Jason Atwood is the co-founder and CEO of the business consulting company Arkus Incorporated. In this episode, we talk about how he progressed from running a carpet company in Africa to becoming a Python developer to getting involved with Salesforce. We also discuss how he formed Arkus. However, our primary focus for this episode has less to do with computer coding and more to do with helping people reach their goals.
Our focal point for this episode is on how to get things done and what that means for developers. We discuss a couple of acronyms that pertain to one’s success and how Jason helps other people and business owners check off their to-do lists and realize their goals.
Show Highlights:
- What the GTD methodology is.
- How Jason helps people work through exercises and create new habits.
- How GTD improves work performance and mental health at Arkus.
- Jason’s favorite resources for people who want to get things done.
Links:
Episode Transcript
Jason Atwood:
Go back a hundred years, how many texts did you get a hundred years ago? How many emails, how many interruptions, how many notifications?
Joshua Birk:
That is Jason Atwood, co-founder and CEO of Arkus Incorporated. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer Podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Jason about how he got into web stuff and how he formed Arkus, but our core today is going to be talking about getting things done and what that means for developers. But we’ll start as we often do with Jason’s early years.
Jason Atwood:
I went to college to party. No, I went to college for business administration.
Joshua Birk:
Really?
Jason Atwood:
Yeah. I think I picked it early on. I remember when I was very young, I want to be a veterinarian. Always want to be a veterinarian. You went through that process when you’re young, “Hey, let’s pick something you want to be.” Then when I got through high school and got into college realizing, “Ooh, it’s very hard to be a veterinarian.” I got fascinated with business and so doubled down on some business courses and ended up going into business administration and really towards entrepreneurship. So, I did my final year. I did a self-study on entrepreneurship.
Joshua Birk:
As somebody who has a failed arc at becoming a psychologist, because turns out advanced biology is actually really, really hard, I totally appreciate that. Well then did your interest in technology come later?
Jason Atwood:
Yeah, it followed me through. That’s what’s interesting is I’ve always been a computer person. I have a picture I post into our internal Slack once in a while of me with a Commodore 64 when I was like 10.
Joshua Birk:
Nice.
Jason Atwood:
It’s got all the hair and I’m trying to open up this printer or something. I had the five and a quarter floppy drives. I played Zork One.
Joshua Birk:
Nice.
Jason Atwood:
So I was deep into technology and it’s just followed me through wherever I went. Whether it was personal life or whether it was in a professional life, I’ve always been interested in it from the get and still am. Here I am that many years later.
Joshua Birk:
Nice and not eaten by a grue. So, congratulations.
Jason Atwood:
There you go. I remember trying to make it eat the lamp over and over again. Eat lamp. You do not want to eat the lamp. Eat the lamp. No.
Joshua Birk:
I love it. Love it. Okay. I’m checking my notes here. You went to Africa to run a carpet company. How did that happen?
Jason Atwood:
So your podcast is like long form, right, five to six hours?
Joshua Birk:
Slightly shorter than that. You have about three minutes.
Jason Atwood:
Okay. So, okay. The three-minute version of it is my mother had moved to Africa when I was still in school over here. She’s there, I think for seven, eight years. During that time period, she had picked up a company. Then when she had come back from Africa, she decided to leave and she sold the company and moved back to New York. But the person who had bought the company for her never ended up actually paying for it. So, I was in my senior year of college. I was this businessperson or starting to be one. So, she called me. She’s like, “Look, there’s this company that basically has never been paid for. Would you be willing to go back after graduating from college and take it back and do something with it?”
Joshua Birk:
Wow.
Jason Atwood:
I said, “Ooh, what a great opportunity.” So, that’s what I spent my senior year doing, is writing the business plan to go back to Africa, take back this company, and it’s 20 to 30 employees and to do something with it. That thread led me through many different avenues of life, but yeah, so that’s how I got to run at 26 run a carpet company in Kenya.
Joshua Birk:
That had to be an amazing learning experience on many levels, I would think.
Jason Atwood:
Many. I got my first ulcer. So, that was the first learning lesson. Every time I tell the story and now doing what I do and being where I am, I always say it gave me incredible perspective, because I did have 20 something employees. In Kenya, the unemployment rate is 50%. So, anybody you employ, you’re not just employing them. You’re not just giving them a paycheck. Also, the average family is seven or eight children per woman. We had all weavers. Weavers were women. So, I knew anytime I did a payroll and paid someone for their wages for that month, I was paying for seven or eight other mouths.
Joshua Birk:
Wow.
Jason Atwood:
So, it became incredibly daunting, honestly, to make sales and to get the numbers and hit the payroll every month. There were months when I’d have to take out from my personal. There was months where there’d be a sale on the last day and I’d run to the bank to cash it just so I could pay. It gave me a great perspective on just the amount of just pressure on making it right and being basically a kid just graduating from college.
Joshua Birk:
Wow. That just blows my mind. I mean, graduating college, I was a security guard for men arts. So, slightly less responsibility to be quite honest. That’s incredible. When did you get involved in what I think you refer to as web stuff?
Jason Atwood:
Web stuff, yeah. That almost doesn’t sound appropriate. So, what happened was I was in Kenya, this is 1995, 1996, and I was running this carpet company. You know what? There was this whole thing coming out in that time, all these articles. By the way, no TV over there really, no radio.
Joshua Birk:
Interesting.
Jason Atwood:
My emails would be sent twice a day. So, you’d send an email and it would go make a connection to London to send an email twice a day. So, it’s literally telegraph at that point.
Joshua Birk:
Wow.
Jason Atwood:
So I picked up some magazines, old ones that had been imported, and there was all this stuff about HTML and webs and websites. I just taught myself on my little computer there in Africa, taught myself HTML, built out a little website with the thought that, “Hey, I could sell carpets online. This is the thing.” So I actually came back to the United States a year in and to set it up, the company, the S corporation over here, and to make it so I could import the carpets from Kenya into the United States and then sell them online. I just absolutely fell in love with internet and computers and technology.
I was updating and writing Perl scripts for the payment gateway. I was just like, “I love all this.” Everybody in my life or three or four very close people turned to me and said, “You know what? This whole carpet thing is cool, cool, cool, but what about this internet thing? It might be a big deal and maybe this is more of your passion, more of your pull than making carpets in Kenya.” So, after a couple months, I was like, “You know what? That’s right.” So, I went back. I actually sold the company to a friend of mine, packed up all my stuff, and came back to the United States.
Joshua Birk:
Wow. What happened to your life as a Python developer?
Jason Atwood:
So I stepped into a job, went on an informational interview. He brought me in just because of as a friend of a friend of a friend, one of these connection things. We ended up having a three-hour interview. They gave me a job. I started off doing web mastering stuff and then they needed people to do some back office. This is 1996, 1997. They needed stuff to happen in the background. So, we were writing interactive websites and everybody was in Perl, of course, just Perl was everywhere. Everybody’s writing Perl scripts, Perl, Perl, Perl.
This one guy, one developer was writing Python. I was like, “Well, why do you write Python? Everywhere used Perl.” He’s like, “Well, object-oriented. It was script and it’s typed and you can do all these cool things.” All the Perl guys were just laughing. So, I was like, “Well, I want to learn Python.” So, he taught me Python and I ended up being a probably below average Python coder for maybe six months or so.
Joshua Birk:
Wow. First of all, I just love a shout-out to Perl. That’s how I basically got my start was writing Perl CGI scripts for State Farm. I would love to have known Python was an option when I was writing Perl. I’m not sure it was or I just wasn’t aware of it. But having compared Python to Perl, I love Perl because it’s like my old school language, but let’s be honest, it’s not the most sophisticated way to run a website.
Jason Atwood:
It is so interesting because I went to work later for a big financial firm that had written their whole portfolio manager. So, where you’d go in, you’d log in as a client and you’d go look at your portfolio, your stocks, your bonds, whatever with trading and it was all written in Perl. In fact, it was one of the biggest problems. We spent millions of dollars over many years rewriting it all in Java because it was like one guy had written it all. It was a million lines of code and it did everything, but no one could ever fix it.
Joshua Birk:
No one could ever read it.
Jason Atwood:
Nope. Nope. You couldn’t read it because that’s his Perl script, his Perl program. I remember we had to keep him on staff for a long time because they just couldn’t get rid of him because he’s the only person who knew it.
Joshua Birk:
Job security for developers. Love it. I have to just throw out random trivia here. Were you a fan of the Selena Sol Libraries?
Jason Atwood:
No, I would say no. Again, I got into Python, I programmed it for about six months. I was doing all those backend stuff. Here’s what happened. At one point, I was like, “I don’t want to program for eight hours a day.” I didn’t actually want to be a developer. I remember talking to my friends who were all developers. I think one was PHP and one was some other crazy web scripting thing. We were all programmers. I was like, “You know what? I think I’m going to go more business side. I mean, I love sitting up all night. I love the Mountain Dew, just drinking Diet Cokes until my eyes bleed.” But I was like, “No. I think I’m the business side.”
Joshua Birk:
Yeah, not your day to day. How did you get involved in the Salesforce?
Jason Atwood:
The Salesforce story is interesting in that I go through a couple jobs. I end up doing web stuff as it were. I ended up being the information systems and technology manager of a 60-person company. So, I ran all their stuff, their backend, their NT servers, their mail servers, their server room. So, really old school IT. I got hired away to go to a startup. The startup was… This was in 2000 and number four at the company. This is right at the very end of the bubble, before the bubble burst. So, it was like, “Why am I in a 60-person company in a windowed office in the World Trade Center at this young age? I should be out IPOing and getting options and doing all the stuff that everybody around me is talking about.”
So, I went to this small startup and we wanted to do everything very cloud-based. I know back then, right, 2000s. So, like our PBX system, our phone system was all internet-based, and that was really, really ahead of its time. We of course ran all our stuff. We had some servers, but we were just always thinking like, “Well, let’s not buy a lot of hardware. Let’s not do that again.” So we were looking for a CRM, and so we’re doing the research. I think now we’re like five or six people, maybe have a salesperson or so. We stumbled across this thing called Salesforce. It was all online. There was no cloud at that point. It’s all online. So, you didn’t have to install anything and you got some licenses and it looked like act of course. It was very, very basic. So, that’s what we used for our CRM.
Joshua Birk:
Wow.
Jason Atwood:
So that was my first thing. I have a screenshot that a friend of mine at Salesforce sent me years and years and years ago. That’s my contact record. It says, created on date. I have the created on date, which is I guess November 4th, 2000. So, that’s like my Salesforce birthday when my contact record was created in the Salesforce Org62.
Joshua Birk:
That is awesome. I think it’s just good to note, first of all, how in 2000 utterly revolutionary that was at the time, just the idea of doing all of that. Also, that’s probably a really interesting screenshot, because I think few people failed to recognize just how different the user interface was back then.
Jason Atwood:
Yeah. So, it’s the screenshots like 10 years later, because I had the person go in.
Joshua Birk:
Got it.
Jason Atwood:
So it’s classic. It’s not as bad as it was, but you could find them. I’ve done the first presentations. I’ve pulled up what Salesforce looked like. Basically, it was Amazon. Benioff always said he stole directly from Amazon tabs and colored tabs. So, yeah, it looked like Amazon from 1997. Yeah.
Joshua Birk:
Okay, let’s talk Getting Things Done or GTD. I’m only familiar with that term where it’s included in some of the apps that I’ve tried that eventually have actually failed to help me get things done. How do you define GTD?
Jason Atwood:
Well, I mean, other than just saying it’s an acronym for Getting Things Done, which is very, very easy. So, when I talk to people getting things done, I just say it’s a set of tools, a set of habits to help people deal with life stuff. We are in a world where the amount of stuff we had to do… Let’s say a hundred years ago, go back go a hundred years, how many texts did you get a hundred years ago? How many emails, how many interruptions, how many notifications? Where was your smartphone? None of this existed. So, the amount of stuff that we have in our life, whether it’s the stuff that we intentionally do to our ourself, scrolling through Instagram or notifications or Slack messages, it’s an onslaught.
So, we need better systems, better tools, better habits to handle that, right? If you don’t have that, you don’t have those methodologies to handle this stuff, you’re going to feel overwhelmed. You’re going to feel stressed. You’re going to be non-productive. You’re going to procrastinate on things. People don’t go, “Oh, I love procrastinating. I’m such a great procrastinator.” No, it’s a negative thing. So, the GTD methodology is just, again, a set of simple habits that wouldn’t really surprise anybody to help them be more productive and live in more of a stress-free environment and be more focused and be able to be present with people without having those thoughts of, “I didn’t do that thing.”
Joshua Birk:
You’re right. Oh, you mean my every other thought? Got it.
Jason Atwood:
Right.
Joshua Birk:
How did you get involved in this?
Jason Atwood:
I got involved simply because I was a procrastinator. I was a massive, massive procrastinator at a job, probably in my personal life. I remember it more at my job at that big financial firm. I just remembered not doing stuff. I would not fill out the TPS report. I would not respond to the email. You had to go to meetings, but I just got the stress and feeling bad about it. It got worse and worse and worse. I’d leave the office. This was a butts and seats organization, so I’d leave the office at 5:30, show up at 8:30 in the morning. I’d just sit behind my desk and just not really do anything, push the papers around.
I just remember thinking this is not good. This isn’t making me happy. Let’s see, what do you do in 2004? I start to Google. I Google some things and procrastination, help procrastination, and up pop this book. I was like, “Okay, click, click, purchase the book from Amazon,” still have the receipt, can pull it up, bought it and then read it and really took it seriously, because it’s like a guide. So, I went through the process and I would say it probably took about a year to really let it go into my full existence, but I’ve been pretty much a big practicer since 2004.
Joshua Birk:
Nice.
Jason Atwood:
Yeah. So, we’re going on 20 years now.
Joshua Birk:
See, that’s really interesting to me because as somebody who’s done a lot of both suffering and research of anxiety, one of the things that really surprised me is how often procrastination comes up, because culturally, we think of procrastination as a character flaw. You’re a lazy individual. You just don’t have the will to get things done. Scientists will tell you that’s just not true. Procrastination is a byproduct of anxiety and your brain going into fight or flight mode.
So, that’s really interesting to me, because you just combined those two things, right? We live in a far more complicated and information filled world, which makes us more anxious, which makes us lead to things like that. So, I think that’s a really interesting path to that goal. At a high level, can you walk me through the GTD method?
Jason Atwood:
Sure. At a high level, we would start off with something called the C-CORE. So, C-C-O-R-E, which is basically the five steps, and it’s to capture everything in and out of your head. So, capture all the open loops, and that’s means to really write it down. That’s all it means. Get it out of your head. Your head’s not a great place for holding things. Sciences probably told us that. So, let’s just capture. Then you clarify, “What does this mean to me?” Okay, I captured mom, right? I captured bank. I captured puppy or whatever on this piece of paper. Then you have to clarify what does it mean to me? Then you go through the process. Is this something that I need to do with it? Then let’s organize it. That just doesn’t mean leave it where it is.
It means put it somewhere where you can take action on it. So, put it in your trusted system, put it in your calendar, put it in your task or project list. Then the R is to review and it’s to go back and reflect or review on the things that are there. That’s a great habit that I think people pick that up very easily, which is how often do you look at your calendar? Most people say, “Well, I look at all the days because it has all the stuff in it.” Then I say, “Well, you should be looking at your tasks and your next actions as often as you’re looking at your calendars. If you look at your calendar twice a day, look at this list twice a day.”
Then once a week, you should be looking at things at a bigger picture. Take a step back, take an hour or two hours, close down the inputs, and do something we call the weekly review, which is you take a look at bigger picture things, all the things on your plate. Make sure that everything is in the right place and has next action to it, has something to do. So, that’s reflect and review. Then the last one of the C-CORE is engage. It’s actually to do things, which is always interesting.
People are like, “Well, why is it the last thing of getting things done?” Because if you haven’t captured, clarified, organized, and reviewed what it is, you can’t do. That’s where people get caught up. That’s the procrastination, because they do things, but they haven’t clarified and organized and reviewed what it is to do. So, that’s where procrastination comes from or one of the many places.
Joshua Birk:
Well, that also to blend back in because there’s a neurodivergent trait of inflating tasks. You don’t wash the dishes because your brain has taken what’s a five-minute thing and convinces you it’s going to take too long. You’re just not going to have time to get that done. So, through that process, you’ll prove the brain wrong effectively. You’ve defined everything that you need to know before you actually engage it. Does that sound right?
Jason Atwood:
Yeah. Actually, so that’s like the core of GTD. That’s what you read about, but then there’s some methods or tips or tools or little things that are outside. I mean, if that was it, that would be a very short book. So, there’s more to that. But one of them is something called the two-minute rule, which I love to try to get people started on. The two-minute rule is if you can do something in under two minutes, just do it. Don’t capture it.
Joshua Birk:
Got it.
Jason Atwood:
Don’t put it in your system because it takes longer to put it in your system than not. I could write down on a piece of paper to take that bottle and put it in the dishwasher or I could just do it. If you start to take the two-minute rule and really work it into your daily existence, go, “Can I just do this in two minutes?” It’s amazing how many things you can just do in two minutes and how many little things you get done.
Also, great for families. I easily teach my child who’s now not a child anymore, turning almost 18 this year, but hey, see that thing that you just left on the table over there? Please go put it in the trash, two-minute rule. It’s great because it’s like, “Just go do it.” Don’t say, “Oh, I’ll do that later.” So that’s one of the little tips that comes out of the book that almost everybody says that’s a great thing to do.
Joshua Birk:
Nice. What is it like to be trained in GTD? How do you work people through exercises so that they get a feeling to do this on a regular basis?
Jason Atwood:
So we at Arkus, when I started the company, one of the things we did is because I’m a big GTD person and the two other founders who had worked for me and I had handed the book to and said, “You better do this because I’m at this level. If you’re not at this level, it’s going to be hard to work with me.” So we just built GTD into the DNA of Arkus. So, now it’s required reading. When you actually start, everybody gets it. Sometimes you get it before you start. You start with the book because that’s just easiest thing to do. So, everybody at Arkus has read the book and then we go through a process. It’s adapted over time. I would say we used to do it a little differently.
Now we have people come in, they read the book, and then they do a lot of shadowing and working with others on how they do their system. So, you might come in and say, “Okay, I’m going to go sit with these three people and talk to them about how they use GTD or how they use that tool.” Then there’s also a part where they meet with me. I still do it. We’ve grown a lot, but I still do this. Every employee comes in and I do what’s called the GTD Bootcamp. I do a two-hour walk people through the methodology, walk them through some other communication stuff, just so there’s like a basis there.
Then finally, we have something called a GTD coach, which is, “Hey, you’re not feeling that productive. You’re feeling a little left out, or maybe some of the system’s not working. Hook up with a GTD coach.” It’s an internal person at Arkus who has mastered the methodology and can talk to you about what the things you can do to make it better.
Joshua Birk:
Got it. I think you just answered this and I’m thinking in terms of developers and developer teams, is this something that people engage with on a personal level or is it every now and then a group exercise or I’m going to guess the answer is probably both.
Jason Atwood:
I mean, it is both because it goes into all parts of your life. Did you capture the notes from the meetings in the next actions? Did you capture what you talked to your spouse about getting the milk and walking the dog? It’s all in your head. The thing about GTD is it’s not a personal or a work-based thing because your head doesn’t have that separation. You’re sitting here right now. If I mention dishes, you’re thinking about dishes now at your house. If I mention Salesforce release schedule, you’re now thinking about work. You can’t stop yourself from doing that. Your brain has no ability to do that.
When do you have the greatest ideas? Oh, when you’re sitting in the shower where there’s no other input, where there’s no screens and technologies and boops and beeps in your life. So, it fits on all sides. That’s why I like to teach it in for what we do is because it works with everything you do.
Joshua Birk:
Got it.
Jason Atwood:
So for the world of developers, developers have a lot of structure generally around what they do, ticketing systems and codes and repositories. There’s a lot there, but what are they doing when I’m writing some great Python code, which again, haven’t written some in a long time, and I have another thought about something else that pings in my head about something that I need to do or my mom’s birthday, or do I need to replace the light in the bathroom at home? What do I do about that? In the world of GTD, we would say, you quickly take a second, you capture it. Now maybe you talk to one of the women who can capture things. Maybe you write it on a piece of paper next to you, but then you go back and you focus back on the work you’re doing.
I mean, you’re a programmer. Keeping in that zone of being able to write code and to problem solve is very hard. The more distractions you have, both externally and internally and externally, I mean people yelling at you or lights going off, you’re not going to write as great. You’re not going to be as focused and write as good code. Same thing with your inner brain. If you are letting your inner brain ping you constantly with little thoughts and ideas that you have. Oh, I should go to Hawaii for vacation this year.
Oh, when do I have to go pick up that prescription? It’s going to stop you from writing the best code as well or being the best developer. So, capture that stuff. You can clarify it later, right? Capture it, throw it in your inbox, and come back to it later. So, I think that’s where it goes across all boundaries.
Joshua Birk:
This is a random question, I think, but it sounds like this is something that would line up, maybe just doesn’t even have to be integrated with, but lines up very nicely in parallel with Agile, which is a philosophy of trying to make your overall developer lifecycle organized and almost a similar manner, I would think, but I would assume you don’t need to necessarily even try to push the two together, but they’re just in sync, I think.
Jason Atwood:
They work well together. We are an Agile shop, surprise, surprise. I actually just sat with the leadership team and one of the things we did is we went through our principles, our standards, and our why of the company as a way to reset what we’re going to do this year in a planning session. One of the pieces is the Agile manifesto, and it’s right there in our documentation. We read it together as a group, so it’s right on the top of my mind because there’s a lot of that. While we do code, we write code as a company, but a lot of what we do is Salesforce configuration and project management and training, but the manifesto still works. So, yeah, we are both an Agile shop and a GTD shop and they work well together.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. So, this is going to be also a random question, because I assume it’s hard to quantify. So, even if anecdotally, maybe you don’t miss deadlines, you have fewer tickets, do you have things that show how this improves the overall life cycle?
Jason Atwood:
I mean, I would say, first of all, do you feel more focused. So, I would say not even not a report you could run, but do you feel less stressed? Are you able to sit and focus on tasks and do the deep work? Newport has deep work. Are you able to do that deep work with less distractions from your own brain? If you are, well, that’s the outcome that, the easier outcome. Then I would say the other things that you would look at, again, not as measurable, but how many dropped balls are there in your organization? How many times did you ping, did you send a note over to Sally and she doesn’t get back to you about it, or did you talk to somebody in the hallway and that they say, “Oh yeah, I’ll do that,” and they don’t do it?
How many times do you leave a meeting and you don’t feel like everybody really knows what they’re supposed to be doing or who really has the next action and who’s really going to follow up? That’s the stuff that gets into corporations that actually slow down and become the gum in the organization. The stuff that we try internally, it’s why it’s nice to practice it internally. We try to not let happen. We have a higher level of trust with everybody at Arkus because everybody’s practicing a methodology that’s really about capturing and clarifying and reviewing stuff. So, we make sure less things slip to the cracks.
Joshua Birk:
Got it. If people are interested in getting this training, for instance, if you do coaching for other people or companies, but what’s your favorite resources to give people if they want to start down this path?
Jason Atwood:
So the first thing I would say is it depends what kind of learner you are. So, we have readers, we have listeners, we have watchers. So, the first thing I’d say is if you’re a reader, obviously, go buy the book. Go to your favorite book place, Getting Things Done, click, click, purchase. The audio book is also a great option. Then there’s actually a TED Talk on… So, that’s if you’re a listener or you’re a reader. I’m a YouTube person, I need to look at it. Just Google David Allen TED Talk on YouTube. It’ll pop up. It’s a 29-minute version and it’s just him telling a story. It’s not how to do it. It’s him telling a story of why it’s important.
I sometimes send people to that as a way of starting them off and saying, “Hey, go look at this thing. If that grabs you, if you think, ‘Ooh, that could help me,’ then go down the other path and grab a book and start reading it or talk to somebody, find somebody who’s practicing it and get some one-on-one.”
Joshua Birk:
Nice. Now speaking of Arkus, what led you to co-founding it and what’s it like to start a company? So was this another ulcer?
Jason Atwood:
No, no, no. I haven’t had one since starting Arkus. That’s great.
Joshua Birk:
Nice.
Jason Atwood:
So while I was working at that big large firm, the financial firm. We make a joke, we never say the name of it, maybe for lawsuit purposes or whatever.
Joshua Birk:
I was on a project briefly that was called Project Voldemort because they weren’t allowed to say the name of the actual client.
Jason Atwood:
There you go. So, what actually happened was we were at this large financial firm. We had been a part of the group that had made one of the largest Salesforce licensing purchases ever at the time. So, we were deep into the Salesforce ecosystem and I started running a center of excellence there where we were building out… I think we had nine production orgs. I had five people and it was great. We were doing consulting internally, big, big, big, big company, lots of orgs, thousands of thousands of licenses. We were rolling out this big CRM for the rest of the company. Then the great happening of 2008 happened and the financial thing.
My company got merged with another company by the government shotgun, and they actually decided to throw out the Salesforce investment, the thing that I’d worked on for two years. They said, “We’re not going to do this. We are going to build our own CRM,” because that works. So, two of my people at work came to me and said, “Hey, let’s take our show on the road. We shouldn’t just sit here and watch them dismantle what we just built over the last two years or two to three years. Let’s take our show on the road. Let’s start a consulting firm.” So, we left to start Arkus in 2010 and have been going strong ever since. Gone from just the 3 of us to I think we’re pushing 70 something at this point.
Joshua Birk:
Nice, nice.
Jason Atwood:
It’s been great.
Joshua Birk:
Very nice. Again, noting this is not a long format and I know that you could probably write a whole book on this, any top of mind advice if somebody is foolish enough to want to start their own business?
Jason Atwood:
I mean in general or in the Salesforce ecosystem?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah, in general.
Jason Atwood:
Yeah. I was actually talking to someone about this the other day who has an entrepreneurial spirit. I was saying the one thing that I think I learned… I read five or six books. I’m that type of learner. We’re going to start a business. Let me go find books. So, I just started reading books. The one that I look back on is actually, it’s just very simple, cash flow. Pay attention to your cash flow. Most businesses die because of cash flow.
Joshua Birk:
Got it.
Jason Atwood:
Maybe they’re underfunded or don’t pay attention or spend too much and they run out. So, that was something we just were very, very cognizant of from the first couple years. It is the lifeblood of small businesses. So, that’s it.
Joshua Birk:
Interesting, interesting. To follow up, since you brought up, what in the Salesforce ecosystem makes starting a business special?
Jason Atwood:
So now versus then. Back then, I mean, we were a Salesforce partner obviously. Back then, Salesforce was paying partners to be partners. Hey, we want partners, we need partners. It was an interesting time, because Salesforce, and again, since I’ve been around Salesforce for many, many, many years now. It was interesting because they used to have a big professional services team, and they were building it out, building it out. I think someone somewhere told them, “Look, you can’t scale to where you want to be by building your own team. You’re going to need to shift and move it to partnerships.” Partnerships are where they went.
So, they shifted their whole thing. They actually made the internal team smaller. They started really trying to build out and say, “Come all you partners, come to the land of Salesforce.” That’s when building out the app exchange and the partner program, the partner portal, and they used to pay us. I’ve had checks from Salesforce. I mean amazing, because now, it’s the reverse. Then they got tons and tons and tons of partners. Then years later, let’s say four or five years ago, it’s like, “Ooh, we have too many partners. Now let’s start to classify them and figure out which ones are the big ones and the gold ones and the silver ones and the little ones and the big ones.”
So nowadays, if you were starting this ecosystem, we had these incredible contacts within Salesforce, friends of ours we’d worked with. So, we were really leveraging that to start. Nowadays, I would be hard pressed to know even how to do it nowadays because it’s interesting. You’re walking to into a much, much bigger space.
Joshua Birk:
More competitive field.
Jason Atwood:
I mean, realistically do good work and the business will come. Make your clients successful and you will get more clients.
Joshua Birk:
Got it. That’s our show. Now, before we go, did I ask Jason’s favorite non-technical hobby? Well, all I can say is cardio.
Jason Atwood:
I like to run races. So, on my non-technical, I like to do running races and long form road races and triathlons. That’s the thing that keeps me sane and away from the computer.
Joshua Birk:
Love it. Jason, thank you so much for the information and conversation. That was a lot of fun.
Jason Atwood:
Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Joshua Birk:
I want to thank Jason for the great conversation and information. As always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about the show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast where you can hear old episodes, see the show, and links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, everybody, and I will talk to you next week.