Ep. 284: Daniel Paik - Reimagining the Back Office: A Profitable Shift
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Count Me In. I'm your host, Adam Larson. And today, we have an exciting and insightful episode for you. Joining us today, we have Daniel Paik, CEO of CureWork and a seasoned expert in corporate finance and accounting with 20 years of experience.
Adam Larson:Daniel challenges traditional views of the back office teams, advocating for them to be seen as value centers crucial to business and growth. He'll share how improving efficiency, automation, and managing tasks with the right tools can significantly boost your organization's performance. We'll also discuss the importance of visibility and task prioritization and the pitfalls of partial views and decision making. Daniel's real life examples and data backed strategies highlight how clear workload visibility can transform management decisions and enhance project completion rates. If you're looking to dive into your team's efficiency and accelerate business growth, you won't wanna miss this conversation.
Adam Larson:Let's get started. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the Count Me In podcast. And we're gonna be talking a lot about the finance team and ways to solve internal problems as we're working through, just our daily tasks and stuff like that as in the part of this conversation. But I wanted to start and just kind of introducing everybody to you and just tell a little bit about your story, how you got to become the CEO of CureWork and your a little bit of your journey along the way.
Daniel Paik:Yeah. Thank you for having me on the podcast, first of all. Thank you for the question. It's it's been something that I did not think of doing or didn't have plans to do. I've been in corporate finance and accounting for the past 20 years.
Daniel Paik:I've been an accountant all the way to CFO. And, basically, why and how I got here was in finance accounting or back office in general. Right? Right? Finance, accounting, HR, IT, administrative departments, which are the departments that I managed.
Daniel Paik:I found that there was a big disconnect between back office and the rest of the the business. And the biggest disconnect was that business the primary goal of business is to grow. But I think the back office, most of us, and I don't wanna offend anybody, but we don't have that kind of mindset in back office. We have more of a process mindset. Whereas in sales and upper management, they have a strategic mindset.
Daniel Paik:And I did not even realize this until I became a CFO. And a couple years into being a CFO, Like, why does my team it does not seem that we're aligned. And the main part was and what actually got me was the business would always talk to other departments like sales, marketing, customer service, and say, Hey. Every year, how do we improve you? How do we make you better?
Daniel Paik:But whenever they came to me, they said, Hey, how do we reduce you guys? How do we mitigate your team? You guys are costing too much. And for 20 years, I've been hearing that, not thinking anything of it. And it just dawned on me in the CFO role.
Daniel Paik:Like, that doesn't seem fair, but the question is why is that the case? And I found that the misalignment was the biggest one and the mindset of process and strategy. Mhmm. And so we're always processing, processing, transactional, and we're not really thinking about growth. So we're just thinking to ourselves, this is hard.
Daniel Paik:We have so much work, and we just keep doing work, work, work. We get burnt out. All these things happen, but we're not me we're probably I mean, I know. We're not spending our time in the most wisest way to help the company grow because we're not thinking in that way. And and the business doesn't train you or teach you to do that.
Daniel Paik:And so that's why I realized I actually realized the solution or the problem what the real problem was, which was that, and created a methodology and a solution to actually help back office come out of from being what I call second class citizens to actually be first class citizens.
Adam Larson:It's an interesting take on that that whole that whole side of it. But I like what you're saying when you're saying that a lot of times in the finance and accounting function, it's like you're just about processes and getting your reports done and stuff like that. And a lot of articles that you read about CFOs becoming the business partner, you know, you know, before we kinda get into the methodology and stuff, can we talk a little about, you know, how do you help your team stop looking at themselves as the processors and and about the growth? Because, you know, the CFO and the higher levels, you know, we're getting to that point where they're becoming the business partner. They're they're sitting at the table.
Adam Larson:They're talking about strategy. But how do you help that go down to the rest of the the rest?
Daniel Paik:It's a great question, and that's what we're trying to solve. I I think I I'm very opinionated, but doesn't mean that I'm right. And I say this all the time. And so I'll tell you my opinions and my experiences. I'm sure there are a lot there are a lot of people that say, no.
Daniel Paik:It's not always that way. And I agree. It's not always this way. Yeah. But I would say in general, even as a CFO and and I worked at small, medium sized companies, so I don't know about the huge, you know, $1,000,000,000 enterprise companies, how how they do know parts of it, but haven't done it, so I can't speak to it.
Daniel Paik:Mhmm. But I think for small, medium sized companies, you know, upwards to a $100,000,000, the CFO doesn't really have a seat at the table. They do, but not as much as I thought that they would. Because you're trained your whole entire life to be transactional and process oriented. And all of a sudden, you become a CFO, and now you're being you're not even they don't even expect it, interestingly enough.
Daniel Paik:You know, you're you're basically you're you're you've done this much work. You have a lot of experience. I need you to manage this team now to do what you do best instead of, hey. We need you to train change yourself to be more strategic. There's not much conversation around a strategic CFO.
Daniel Paik:I think there's more and more, and I see it on LinkedIn as we realize, oh my gosh. With the age of AI, all of these processes are gonna be more more and more automated. So now the natural reaction is, well, how do I preserve myself? Well, we have to go to strategy. But what does strategy mean?
Daniel Paik:And I think that's a confusion point for a lot of people. I ask a lot of people, what is strategy to you? And there's so many different ways of talking about strategy. And so people just say, we'll let you answer it, right, instead of answering it. But I would say strategy in a business side for what we're talking about, simply what we need to do to grow.
Daniel Paik:Mhmm. What we need to do different, actually, to grow. And that mindset is not even that's not even said in in in businesses, and not even talked about with back office teams. We're so inundated with what we're what we were doing. So busy with the chaos, all of the firefighting that we do.
Daniel Paik:And so it has to come from the top. It has to come from not just CFO, but all the C suite to understand how do we actually bring back office into more strategic roles and strategic thinking and not just treat them as administrators or admins. I had literally a person, I won't say who, that said, hey, Daniel. Your teams are admins. Like, my whole team, finance, FP and A.
Daniel Paik:It's easy. Why can't you get all these things done? And that just told me the business does not know what we do and the value that we bring. So it starts there, visibility. So I won't go too much into the methodology, but it really starts at visibility to know where we are now so that we can improve ourselves to to be more strategic.
Adam Larson:That's a really interesting take because a lot of times people talk in a very lofty sense of all the theories and all the great ways you can do that. But sometimes, these great theories that people bring forth only apply in organizations that are so large that they can afford to do those changes. And a lot of times in small to medium sized businesses, your CFO has is wearing so many hats. It is harder to be that strategic partner. So I I appreciate that perspective that you brought forth.
Adam Larson:You know, so if so, you know, I I I love how you identified all that. You know? So maybe we can talk about, you know, what exactly are we trying to solve? And then from there, we can kind of go into, you know, how do we solve that?
Daniel Paik:So what we're trying to solve is, I mean, really at the high level, transforming your mindset from process to to to strategic. But what does that mean? Yeah. Right? So underneath that is and I I don't I I'm very practical.
Daniel Paik:We're we're finance accounting people. We're about ones and zeros and ones, and and it's about facts. Right? And theory is theoretical, so it doesn't mean that it works or, you know, how do we actually apply it? So I'll I'll I'm gonna speak more in practical terms.
Daniel Paik:So how do you move from a process mindset to a strategic mindset? What are we actually saying there? Or in another way, you can say, from a cost center mindset to a profit center mindset. Right? That's a different that's another way of saying it.
Daniel Paik:And the question then is, well, why are why are back office people called cost centers? Right. I don't I've never asked this question in the past couple of years, myself. And the answer that I came up with then, talking to people, the answer is it's very simple. We are cost generating we are called cost centers because we spend most of our time on cost generating activities, like payroll, month in close, tax, auditing, hiring, reporting.
Daniel Paik:Right? These are not profit generating. If I do more payroll, doesn't mean I get more revenue or profit. Right? That that doesn't make sense.
Daniel Paik:So we're stuck doing a ton of process work or cost generating work. And then the question is, well, then how do I get to strategy or profit generating work? Well, what then the question is, what part of your job or your tasks relate to growth, relate to profit and revenue? And there is an actual answer. And the answer is projects.
Daniel Paik:So in any given time, in a in any company, I've yet to find one company and go, oh, we don't have any projects. Well, that doesn't make any sense. So I'll start here. Is business leaders, their primary goal is to grow. And if that's the case, we call and that we call that what?
Daniel Paik:Strategic initiatives. And strategic initiatives turn into a portfolio of projects. And then you have one project that you give to a group, a department, a team, a person. And so there's tons of these in a company. I mean, I I talk to people and they say, oh, we have a project offer.
Daniel Paik:I go, how many projects do you have in any given time? And then some people go like, I don't know. Like, 50 to 60? How many do you get done every year? They're like, 1, 2, sometimes 0, depending on the year.
Daniel Paik:And so and and there are these projects that are so important. Everybody knows when you talk about it, and you talk about it every year. And it's been 6 years later, they're still talking about it. And the question is, why can't these projects get done? So I think we're in in in this world, the business are really good at I would say they're really good at strategy or planning strategy, not so great at executing strategy.
Daniel Paik:And I say that in in in the confines of the the strategy or the projects, that are internal. Right? Not customer facing, like, projects. It's more like the internal projects to improve yourself, to improve policies and procedures, to implement, like, NetSuite or an Oracle or an SAP, better in automation. And what what you find is all of those internal projects planned at the top, execution, predominantly back office.
Daniel Paik:Even when I I did Salesforce implementations twice in my life. I did ERP many times. And sales had very little to do with the Salesforce implementation. It was literally all my back office teams that did it. Right?
Daniel Paik:So the people that actually execute on the projects are back office people. But what did what what what we discussed right now that most of our time is spent on cost generating activities. There are actually 2 different types. 1 is your recurring work, payroll, month enclosed, tax, etcetera. The second one takes 30 to 60% of someone's entire year called ad hoc work.
Daniel Paik:We call it firefighting. The daily issues, interruptions, problems that we solve now, now, now because then we think that's the keyword. We think that it's urgent and it's a fire. Some maybe, but many many of them, we don't we don't think twice. Someone just says, I need this, and you go and you wanna help.
Daniel Paik:Right? You're a good person. You're you get great at what you do, so you you help without realizing that there's a third type of work, which is projects, the strategic side that's sitting there that's probably 10 times, a 100 times more valuable to spend time on. But we're always stuck on the first two, the recurring and ad hoc. 90 to a 140% is is what I find in my in our, assessments with our clients.
Daniel Paik:90 to a 140% of their time in a year is spent on recurring and ad hoc. So, therefore, no wonder projects never get done and they keep piling up. So how do we move then from cost center or, process to strategic? Simply free up time to do more projects or to strategic work.
Adam Larson:So if those things are taking up 90 to a 140 percent of your time, how do you how do you create the time to to do those those projects that we're talking about?
Daniel Paik:Alright. That is where the secret sauce is. Okay. And it's a paradigm shift in how you work. It's not and when I say that, people go, Oh, it's gonna be hard.
Daniel Paik:It's it's actually simple. We do it all the time, but we don't apply it to corporate or office work or back office work. So as an example, when we do marketing campaigns, right, we measure everything. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna say it?
Daniel Paik:How many are we gonna send out? Who's who are we gonna send it out to? Which landing landing pages are do we want people to funnel them to? We AB test it. And there's all of this testing and measuring being done.
Daniel Paik:And that's just marketing a mark one marketing campaign. We do that for sales. We do that for customer service. But the one function that we don't almost ever do it for, back office. Right?
Daniel Paik:So we don't therefore, since we don't measure, we can't improve. There's a famous quote that I'm sure you heard of that Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, said is, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. If you don't know where your starting point is, you don't know if you've actually did better than where you currently are because you've never measured it. And the fundamental issue of back office is that we don't measure, so we can never improve ourselves. And therefore, the world never asks, how do we improve you guys?
Daniel Paik:They ask, how do you reduce you? Because we can't show value because we don't measure. So measurement is critical. But not just measuring to measure in itself. It's measuring the fullness, like, all of what you do.
Daniel Paik:So there are project management systems, task management systems, work management tools in this world. 100 of them, actually. I would say the number one biggest miss is that number is that they only capture a partial picture of your work. So imagine if you have a 100 things to do, but you only capture 20 of them. And so the whole business only knows 20 things that you're supposed to do when you have 80 other things over here.
Daniel Paik:And you're you're asking the business and the manager and the person to make a decision off of the 20 out of the 80. Right? You're probably not gonna make the right decision. You're probably not gonna be able to prioritize properly. You're probably not and we don't.
Daniel Paik:And therefore, we're always stuck. All this 80% of the work that we didn't measure and capture, well, we have to do them anyways. So, hence, we can never again get to the project value added work. Because, again, the first two are the more important and more urgent seemingly than the projects when the value is in the projects and the the the strategic type of work. So it's measuring the fullness or the totality of your work is what it
Adam Larson:is. So how do you properly measure the totality of your work without creating way too much more work? Because you're writing, like because the way you just described it, it almost felt like you're saying, okay, make sure you write down every little thing that you're doing so that everything can be measured. I know that's not what you're saying, but I mean, we can help clarify that.
Daniel Paik:Yeah. So it's a really great question. And I think that's where I probably do need to do a better job in explaining it in the beginning. So I'm also learning My marketing muscle, I'm still I'm starting to use it more. And so words, I'm just so factual and so detailed.
Daniel Paik:I just I'm not trying to get myself out of it. But anyways, I'm already doing that now. So the totality of your work, if you think about it and you break it down into those 3 buckets, recurring, ad hoc, and projects. Okay. Recurring work is in and of itself.
Daniel Paik:The definition is measurable. It recurs.
Adam Larson:True.
Daniel Paik:Right? And therefore, you you know, it's a bay at the end of the day, it's a you utilization or capacity, resource capacity on where you spend your time. Mhmm. So your job description, really, the current job description is doesn't do anybody really any good. It's so generic.
Daniel Paik:It's like, what is this? And you get into the job and you say, that is not what I thought this was gonna be. And you just get inundated. Right? And it takes what?
Daniel Paik:6 to 9 months for anyone to actually get onboarded. Mhmm. That's ridiculous. 6 to 9 months. And we go, that's normal.
Daniel Paik:Why is that a norm? That doesn't make any sense. And so what we do is we modernize a job description into job deliverables. We say, rewrite your job description into what you deliver. Mhmm.
Daniel Paik:And since since it's recurring, tell us how many times it recurs, but how long on average it takes you to do it one time. It's an average. You don't have to be exact. Like, bank recs can take 4 hours 1 month, take 20 hours another month because somebody messed up over there or something happened. Right?
Daniel Paik:But we just wanna know, what is the average? 8? Well, let's just put 8. Right? Because we just wanna know in general where you're putting your time and and if you're putting their time to the right things.
Daniel Paik:So once you do your recurring, one and done. Takes, like, an hour. Right? The second thing is unplanned. So unplanned is unplanned, so you can't plan for it.
Daniel Paik:You can't say, I'm gonna do these things because you can't you don't know what's gonna happen. So it's that's where you just manage the tasks that come in. So you're putting in tasks. And the question is, oh, that seems like more work. But I ask everybody, well, how do you then manage your unplanned tasks today?
Daniel Paik:People go, oh, I put it in my, you know, Asana Monday or I put it in my calendar. Then some guy goes, if you could see my 3 monitors, I have 75 Post it notes. So we do spend time managing it. Might as well do it in a standard universal way where you can measure it and you can report off of it. Mhmm.
Daniel Paik:There's a there's also so many other studies that show there's one study that shows that productive hours for an office worker on average you know what that number is? 2 hours and 53 minutes a day out of 8 hours. Wow. And the question is why? And, yes, there's things like context switching, you know, interruptions.
Daniel Paik:You're looking at your Facebook, whatever it may be. My experience and the things that I I mean, I've been managing the past 20 years. I would say what they don't say and then what they don't what they miss, in my opinion, is people are stressed because there's a lack of clarity into work. They don't know exactly what they're supposed to do. And And so they're constantly thinking about what they need to do and stressing in it's like a vicious cycle.
Daniel Paik:You stress yourself out because you don't really know what to do. So you're thinking about what you should do and try to self prioritize. There's a saying, if your manager doesn't prioritize, it doesn't mean that doesn't get prioritized. Actually, someone always prioritizes it, and it's the in in person that actually executes. So if you don't if your manager does not help you prioritize, well, the end user is gonna make their own decision, think whatever's best, and prioritize themselves.
Daniel Paik:And usually, they're gonna do the most easiest one, the one that they know. Right? And but projects are things that they don't know. Challenging. You have to think.
Daniel Paik:It hurts your brain. So that even if you have some time, you're gonna do the easy stuff. Although you know that that's probably more important. So without proper prioritization, you can't do it, but you can't properly prioritize it without visibility. Mhmm.
Daniel Paik:Right? So it's really people think, and this is where my marketing side has come in, is you spend probably 3, 4 hours a day, wasted hours, thinking about stressing about why do you look at Facebook? Because you're trying to I'm so stressed. Like, I need to look at Facebook today right now because I don't know what to do. I don't want to do that.
Daniel Paik:I don't know which one to do. So but imagine if you knew, oh, every day. Oh, these these 8 tasks needs to be done. What happens? I have seen with my own eyes and even with my team and our clients, they get all 8 done because it's there.
Daniel Paik:Yeah. They we want structure. So it doesn't time wise, it may take 30 minutes a day. It seems like a long time. But imagine, if you don't do that, you waste 3 hours to 4 hours.
Daniel Paik:No.
Adam Larson:I I think you really framed it really well in helping people understand, like, hey, if you get some random thing come at you, you do something with it. Like and if your whole organization uses, like, a Monday or Asana, that could be measured. You can use that to measure as well or or some other software. Like, you need to find ways to track those things properly. And I think it's it's reminding people that you're not doing extra work.
Adam Larson:You're actually just doing the same thing. Just put it in a place so that it can be tracked and measured. Right?
Daniel Paik:Yep. And the critical part is full picture, holistic. You cannot have partial information to make decisions off of it. Right? Can't build a car with partial, whatever, what do you call instructions?
Daniel Paik:Right? What do I and if you have partial under a view of the the the what am I trying to Screws and bolts and, you know, other parts and pieces. I'm a car guy, and I can't think of the words. So what is wrong with me right now? But
Adam Larson:Yeah. Pistons. You know?
Daniel Paik:It piss. Exactly. So once you if you have the full picture and you all the schematics, you can do it. Mhmm. That makes sense.
Daniel Paik:That's how we actually work. But for whatever reason, in the office work, back office, cost center work, we go, good luck. Here, we're just gonna throw a ton of things at you and make sure you do them all. I'll tell you one one hilarious thing, but that's not that hilarious, is that another leader, of mine, I we were our team was so overworked, and I said, hey, we can't do all this. And I did the math on it.
Daniel Paik:I was like, it's just it we would need 4 more people just to stay above water. I go, which ones do you want us to do? Here's the list. And he looks at the list, and you know what he said? Because I really need, like, you've actually done an order priority wise.
Daniel Paik:Yes. I agree with your priorities 1 through 5, but we need all of them done. I said, did you not hear what I just said? And he goes, Daniel, you just gotta make it work. What?
Daniel Paik:Because I can only show him the top ten, but there was 800 things behind it that he did not see. Right? So our what we're building is a is a is a way for you have perfect visibility, single source of truth. If you have that, instead of saying why can't you do it, why isn't this done, where is this, you told me last week, dot, dot, now you have everything go, oh, our managers, their way of speaking has changed to where, how, why didn't this happen to. What can I help you with?
Daniel Paik:How can I support you on this? Because now they know exactly what's not being done, and they know why. Oh, you got 4 more unplanned work that came in from from sales. There's a huge fire over there. I see you can't get that done.
Daniel Paik:That's important. Let me do that for you. And so now there's more collaboration, more trust, more autonomy, more ownership, all the good things. So it's been it's been it's been amazing just by visibility.
Adam Larson:I mean, that really that really sounds more amazing because I feel like organizations constantly go through those struggles. And even when you get new leadership into organization, they say, oh, this is how you're doing the project management. Well, I like doing it this way, so we're gonna change to that. And then maybe some new person comes in for a few years later and try to change everything around. You know, how do you how do you avoid that?
Adam Larson:And how can you get people on board? Because when somebody's been doing something for so long, especially long term employees or somebody's always done project management a certain way, And they come into a team and they're like, well, this is how we do our project management. You know, how do you kind of how do you get build that trust within the organization to to have them change, try these new things to make it efficient?
Daniel Paik:No. It's a great question. And and it's I might be a little bit repetitive here. But the reason why, my opinion again, we keep moving from system system to system to system is partial view of work. So what we see, one person comes in.
Daniel Paik:This is my experience. I know this. So I'm gonna do it this way because I just know this information. Another person goes in, oh, I had this other thing. We have to also look at that.
Daniel Paik:And so we're gonna do that. But imagine if you just had the whole thing, this is what your whole workforce is doing. This is where they're spending their time. These are this is the capacity that they have to do projects. By by the way, your whole workforce or your back office has 2,000 free capacity 2,000 hours of free capacity.
Daniel Paik:But the system shows the number of projects that you wanna complete this year is 20,000. We only have 2,000 hours of capacity. Well, now you can start making you can start asking questions, making decisions on what the real priority is. And if you really want to get all 20000 hours of project work done, well, you're gonna have to hire more people probably. Or take eliminate all of the unnecessary less value adding activities and reallocate them to the project work.
Daniel Paik:Right? But the whole thing about projects and work in back office, in corporate offices, is the issue is partial view. And we're constantly making decisions on partial views. And so you have a partial view of something. I have a partial view.
Daniel Paik:That person has partial view. So we're opinionated just on our viewpoint. But if we add the holistic view, I have I'll give you an example. It's a it's very unbelievable example, actually, that happened by accident. We we were, helping a customer, and we did our assessment.
Daniel Paik:We found that this accounting manager was a 140% utilized just on recurring work just on recurring work. Her her you know what she says? She goes, Daniel, I feel so vindicated today. I've been telling them the the business and my manager, I'm so busy. No one believed me until today.
Daniel Paik:Because now my manager looked at what I what I wrote, on my tasks and the hours, And she went, yeah. Yeah. That's what you that's what you do. That's about how much time? A 140%.
Daniel Paik:That's not good. And she's like, I've been asking for help for a year and a half. Right? And then if you add her ad hoc work, another 40%. That's like a 180%.
Daniel Paik:You said, Daniel, I work minimum 2 weekends a month. She's a accounting manager. What is she working almost 7 days a week throughout the whole entire month? That's doesn't make any sense. And so they went to, the CEO and said, hey.
Daniel Paik:We need to send your accountant. First words, absolutely not. We talked about this. Your team is not, completing all the projects that I want. You actually did 0 in the past 2 years.
Daniel Paik:How can you justify a new hire? And he goes, oh, thank you for asking the question. And now with our assessment and our system, we say, hey. This is what's actually happening. Your team, your accounting manager is a 140% utilized just on recurring work.
Daniel Paik:These other two accountants are a 105, 110%, without even the ad hoc work if you add 30 to 40% more at least. And so because of that, you have these 11 projects that you want done. We have no time to do them. So if you add this new person and they have it by deliverable, we're we're gonna take the 45% from the county manager, 15% from these 2 guys. That's 75% utilization of recurring work for the new guys.
Daniel Paik:So we know exactly what we're paying for. If you do that, we free up 20% of the team's time. They can do 4 out of 11 projects this year. What do you wanna do? His next words, he literally went, well, then hire already and walked away.
Daniel Paik:For a year and a half, they've been trying to hire somebody, getting help. It took 8 minutes from a no to a yes because of the clarity and visibility into what is actually happening. And it makes sense. Now the quick now his if he says no, then you can say, we're still not gonna get any projects done, and we're gonna be working our butts off and they may quit. So you make that decision, right?
Daniel Paik:So visibility just it's it unlocks everything. This is why I feel like I have gold in my hands, but I'm trying to help people go look at this gold. You can have it too. But it it's a new way of thinking, new way of working. Yeah.
Daniel Paik:And it's, I think, scary and and change management is always hard for people. So, you know, we're trying to step by step.
Adam Larson:Step by step, little by little education through podcasts, getting people interested in, hey. Let me check out CuraWork, you know, check out the link in the show notes, everybody. If you wanna learn more about CuraWork and what, you know, Daniel and his team are doing there. But it's a it's it is a complete different mindset. And I and let's say you're in on the accounting team and you're recognizing, hey, if I were to do this thing, I'm probably like the example Daniel gave and I'm doing 140%.
Adam Larson:But I know my boss isn't, you know, how would somebody approach that conversation saying, hey, boss, we should check out this system because we're not being efficient in our time. You know, are there, like, things that they can do to try to, you know, present to their boss so that they can, you know, start trying to do something like this?
Daniel Paik:Yeah. You can do it the hard way. So you don't have to use our system. You can you can do it through Excel. I mean, I I the, proof of concept that I did was was Excel, but it took me 4 hours a day to manage it.
Daniel Paik:So you can do that. I I can you can call me and ask me how to do it, but really, you're you're managing your your tasks in those 3 buckets and showing visibility into the time and u utilization and all the unplanned work and the source. Who is giving it to you? Is it always, like, 40% sales that's giving all this work? Is it operations?
Daniel Paik:So managing and understanding that into an easy to way digestible, report that shows you this is what's happening with me. What do you want me to do? Right. So it doesn't even have to come from management and you do this. A lot of the times we're seeing individual contributors saying, well, I just need to know what I'm doing.
Daniel Paik:I'm going crazy. It's chaotic. No one believes half the things I do. I'm so busy, but then it's just, I just keep getting more and more work. Well, I just start managing your work.
Daniel Paik:You'll understand. Oh my gosh. I spend 14 or 14 hours a day. I knew I was working a lot, but 14 hours whenever it comes to month end close. This has happened before, a few months ago, and and, she was like, I no wonder I was about to quit.
Daniel Paik:Like, this is not good. And and she brought in the manager and said, Hey, this is what my workload looks like. And the manager goes, that's not good. And he goes, woah. What are those things?
Daniel Paik:Don't even do that. I'll talk to Bob. Alright. I'll I'll get that off. And he just started automatically just taking it off her plate because there's visibility.
Daniel Paik:He had no idea she was doing all these other things. So it was just managers. May I say one may one thing here? So much to say, but when we start working and get into the workforce, we are not taught how to work. And when we try to get to the next level to managers, not taught how to manage, we actually learn by other managers.
Daniel Paik:And there I say, a lot of bad managers beget other bad managers. And so why do most people go, I had so many bad managers? Well, we're learning from managers that don't know how to manage the right? And so it's trial by fire. Yeah.
Daniel Paik:Right? And so what we provide the the reason why, my opinion, is that workers and managers don't are not as efficient. It's not because they're bad workers or bad managers. They don't have the right system or methodology or mindset in place to say this is the this is best practice or leading practice in into general way of how you work. So starting with managers, why is there mac micromanagement?
Daniel Paik:Because they don't know what people are doing. The if you if you see the things that come out of their mouth, where is this? Why isn't this done? How come you said you said this on Thursday and Tuesday? Where where where is that?
Daniel Paik:What does that actually mean? I don't know what you have done. I don't know what your plan is. I don't know when you're gonna get this done. So but if you had it, there's no micromanagement disappears.
Daniel Paik:It's eliminated. And it turns and what takes its place is real management, which is helpfulness. Right? Which is helping develop the person. Oh, you have time?
Daniel Paik:Well, you should work on this project because that's gonna help you learn how to do ERP implementations. But if you have never have time, you're so busy, they're not gonna put you on these tasks that help you professionally grow. And so and and and going back down to the individual contributor contributors, just having visibility into your work, you can now create reports. You can articulate clearly the value that you bring. You can actually even do ROI.
Daniel Paik:And I won't even get into that because that's a whole another segment. But you can do ROI of what you do, and you can show at the end of the year, hey. I did this. This is my normal work. I completed everything.
Daniel Paik:When Betty went on maternity leave, I took 40% of her work for 6 months. I completed 4 projects. And this is this is what we believe the ROI was. How and it's not even hard. And that's it's just time management.
Daniel Paik:If you boil it down Yeah. Managing your time. Mhmm. Right? So we just need a methodology, a simple one that's universal that everybody can use, that you can compare across the board.
Adam Larson:Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're what you're trying to do is help organizations kind of reset the foundation of how they even just or run their business. Like you said, certain sides do this, certain side the impact office just focus on this. But if everybody's looking at everything they're doing from that same perspective, your organization will be on be in a better place in the long run.
Daniel Paik:Yeah. Yeah. This is anecdotal, and it's happening now. But doing this, proof of concept with a few few few teams, 900% increase in project completions. That's 9 years of projects in 1 year.
Daniel Paik:And because of that, their their, revenues grew 14 percentage points. Not 14%, but percentage points. From a year on year growth of maybe 8, 9% to 23%. Yeah. And their EBITDA or their profit margins grew 5 percentage points from 17 to 22, as an example.
Daniel Paik:I mean, it's real dollars. We're not just doing this just to make people happier, although that's what it's going to do, but it has huge business impact. Imagine if you could do 900% more projects of what's been on there for 6, 7 years and complete them. You free up all these people's time. You have more automation.
Daniel Paik:You're getting all the strategic work done. You're able to expand to EMEA 2 years faster. Right? And so it's the back office I'll say one of the last things here. The back office, we are called second class citizens, and it's the biggest mistake in this world.
Daniel Paik:The back office and I'm biased, but the back office we are called back we get all the issues. So we actually know 80% plus of all the problems in the company. And we know how to fix them, but we don't have the time. So you if you utilize your back office properly, and don't call it back office, call it value centers or something like that, or don't call it cost centers, your company could accelerate growth double, triple than what you thought you could do just with your sales and marketing teams. You should use your whole team to grow your business, not just apart.
Daniel Paik:It's just, what are we doing? Mhmm. Right? And we're they're both very, very important, but one is less valued than the other. Underinvested, there's there's less tools, less innovation, but we need to bring them back and and actually show that and tell them they have value and give them the autonomy to show that value.
Adam Larson:Well, Daniel, I really appreciate your passion for this, and I and I agree. And from what I've seen and experienced myself, I can see the need for this, and I really appreciate you sharing it with our audience. And I really encourage everybody to get on and check it out and start thinking about how they work in their organizations.
Daniel Paik:Thank you. Love being on the podcast. It was it was great. Thank you again.
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