Building Team Productivity With The Correct Project Management Solution With Ted Hawksford
Every business owner wants full productivity when it comes to working. No matter what your industry is, project management plays a big role in your team. Ted Hawksford believes in that role because he is the CEO of LiquidPlanner. He helps businesses with his project management program so that they can achieve team productivity and effectiveness. Join your host, Chad Burmeister, and his guest, Ted Hawksford, talk about Ted’s company and how he plans to grow it. Go through Ted's career from when he worked for Microsoft to starting his own company. Learn how to bounce back from being let go from your job. And learn why being in a team where everyone shares the same goal makes a big difference.
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Building Team Productivity With The Correct Project Management Solution With Ted Hawksford
I am with Ted Hawksford. He is the CEO of LiquidPlanner. It's an interesting story how he got the role because his neighbor is the founder of the company and that's how he ended up at LiquidPlanner. Anyone who tells you relationships don't matter, they're wrong. That's how Ted got the role that he's in. Ted, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Chad, happy to be here.
I'm going to be interested to dig into LiquidPlanner a little bit but before we get there, to help our audience get to know who you are. I like to go back and rewind the tape and go all the way back to your early childhood. Which part of the world were you raised in? What did you like to do when you got up in the morning? What was your thing at those ages?
I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. My dad was in the Air Force in Bossier City but I don't remember much of that. I moved back to where my family is in the Seattle, Washington area and that's really where I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. As a child, it was all about getting out on my bike and being outdoors. We lived with a big patch of woods in the backyard so it was hiking. It was exploring.
I hear the woods story a lot and I think a lot of people have a perception and probably reality that that's not as prevalent as it used to be. When we lived in Charlotte, it backed up against the forest. My kids would run in the back and there were copperhead snakes every once in a while. We were always a little nervous but a lot of kids were running around there and thankfully nobody ran into a pile of them. It is interesting how times change over the years. Looking back when you were doing that, riding bikes, going in the forest, what role did you play? It's always interesting because I think when we're children, we're unfiltered by the world. We don't have any influence by teachers and parents yet until we start, "Johnny, come on home," and we learn those behaviors. What did you learn about yourself looking back on who you were at those ages?
Probably independence. I grew up in a situation where I was a little older than three younger sisters. My parents divorced at one time when I was twelve. To a degree independence and secondarily responsibility. I needed to be part of the family unit that helps the family unit thrive. I suppose I always found my own way to entertain myself but also to participate as a member of the family. Both of those things are characteristics that probably show up in who I am, how I behave and how I live.
When you say family, it's almost part of the team also because the family is the team. How does that then relate to the way that you do life?
The team is important. I didn't introduce it. Being part of the team is always critically important. I remember early on being a frontline manager in the hospitality industry and the general manager called a meeting, as he did every week but then about halfway through the meeting, he invited us, two junior members of the team to exit and that hurt to be discluded from the team. I didn't realize how emotional I might become if that was the case but it taught me a lesson that into the future, I never wanted to make a member of my team feel that way. Inclusion and belonging became important before they became taglines and more frequently used words in the business vernacular.
I remember there was an SVP that I worked with one and I was included in the team meeting. However, my laptop was up and ready to present and apparently, while I was down eating lunch, he decided to thumb through all my slides and I said, "That's my presentation." I'm going to go over it with all of these senior leaders in the company. I'm a co-senior leader. He went ahead and got into my stuff. I was like, "That's not appropriate." It didn't feel right as part of the team. I can definitely hear where he coming from on that one.
I didn't close the loop of that story but the conversation was he had received guidance to cut the team by one person and it was going to be one of the two junior people and he needed to have a conversation with the other leaders. There were ways. He could have called a meeting with the senior leaders on the team to have that dialogue without putting us in that uncomfortable position. You just need to be thoughtful as a leader as your senior VP wasn't and inviting himself to look at your information. He could easily have asked for your permission or ask for you to walk him through it and that would have been net positive instead of net negative.
Everybody that I talked to on this show runs into something in life, some more than others that are just above threshold and many times, many standard deviations above the threshold. Is there one of those times that you're comfortable sharing? I call it running into the buzzsaw. Where it's just something that knocked you down and then share what was it and how did you get through it. I think a lot of people reading are going through something or they're about to and hearing your story of how you faced it is valuable to them.
I think you're right. We all run into challenges whether they're personal or business and probably both. For me, I'll share a business challenge that I ran into. I mentioned already, I started my career in hospitality in an operation so a business professional but in that industry, I shifted towards human resources. Leveraging my care of others and desire to serve from a hospitality perspective, into the care of others and desire to serve a group of employees or the whole company.
Project Management: Have an appreciation for those challenging times. The times where you had to rethink how you do business, how you embraced and overcame challenges, and how you got past any failures that emerge.
At one time, I found my way to Microsoft. I'm proud of having moved into tech and one of the largest, most successful companies in the world and ended up spending a few years there. Three years in Xbox, three years in MSN and later Bing and then three years in Windows. The challenge emerged when I moved to the Windows division. Having navigated a career of always finding success, I found myself in a business of Microsoft that wasn't successful.
We were just launching windows Vista, a launch process supposed to take three years. It took more than five. The senior leader of that business had a reputation for being tough to work with but I always was confident in my ability to build relationships and to find a path to success. To find a path to add value and in this case, I couldn't. While he had a reputation that preceded my efforts, I thought I could cut through that.
After 1 failed attempt that turned into 2 and that ended in 3, I tried harder and that wasn't the right path. Ultimately, it affected my overall reputation at the company and I was invited to leave. There was a pretty aggressive effort to cut the bottom performers at the company every year and I was in a compare group that stacked me against people much more senior, much more capable than I was at that time.
If was a gut punch to be asked to leave a company where I had had seven years of prior success to have never had failures like that as a professional and to be asked to leave a company that I was so proud to be part of, but I did. I found a new role. It was a bigger, better role that led to a head hunter finding me and I found a better role still and recovered from it. I can look back now with a lot of appreciation for that challenging time where I had to rethink how I do business, how I embraced and overcome challenges and how I get past failures when they do emerge.
That's the resounding answer that I hear over and over again. In the look back, my next job was better. I made more money then I was headhunted and it even became better. When you have faith in life and it's moving up into the right, it's rare that it's going to actually be worse than what you had but you're so used to the reality of waking up every day and doing what you're doing, that the unknown sometimes and the uncertainty is what's painful in the middle. When people read this show and all the shows and recognize that people go through stuff in life and it usually 99.999% ends up being better than it was, that's a pretty amazing thing to grab ahold of.
Now as an HR professional, I've helped people that are part of the business community. I am part of or part of the company. I've helped neighbors and friends navigate through these situations where they've been asked to leave the company, they're laid off or they're fired. It's tough for people to admit it but there is a path and it can very often be successful. It's a forced transition in life. I'm a big fan of Carol Dweck's work, the mindset and always be learning, always embracing opportunities, whatever they are to learn from them and decide to grow and get better as a result.
I was let go from my first job out of college and talk about a gut punch. You're like, "I thought I was a pretty good salesperson in college and even before that," and then ten months in, you are let go. That was the beginning and it caused me to say, " I'm going to work smarter, read books and learn." My bookcase of books is extremely full and it has been over the years and you just have to sometimes use those life experiences to continue to progress. Share a little bit about LiquidPlanner. It sounds like that's a cool company. You've been at it for many years. You're pivoting a little bit. How does that help companies? Why are you in the role you're in? What gets you up in the morning around your current day job?
LiquidPlanner is a pretty cool company, at least we think so. It's a project management solution. We do a little bit more than most of the similar tools in the industry. We have an algorithm that helps predict with incredible accuracy when projects will be done and when resources or people can be redeployed to other work. The reason I was attracted in the first place was that it's a mechanism. It's a tool. It's an approach to work that genuinely helps people be more effective and more productive.
I've always aspired to help people do that in their careers. To enjoy their work, to feel like they belong, to feel like they're contributing meaningfully and to advance in a positive path on their career. Project management skillsets and the application of tools to be even better can help everybody in every discipline no matter their profession or industry. It's ubiquitous. Our tool and solution can help everybody. We're excited about what we're doing. What we realized and what prompted the pivot is that the original product, while it was powerful and really capable as I've described in helping teams and helping companies, it was hard to learn. Hard to adopt, hard to get a whole team to adopt. We’ve rebuilt it from scratch. Not a single line of code was repurposed.
It's on a new code base but we made it easier to navigate and learn. We've built in a product called Academy that prompts individuals to learn. As in your career, you always need to be learning. In fact, that's one of our core values, always be learning. Our product reflects that with this Academy functionality. We're excited about the potential of our new version of the same product and we are now starting to introduce it to the industry.
We used a product. It's in the project management space. It's named after a day of the week and we'll just leave it at that. What I've found is it was good for internal employees when we were onboarding a customer but we had to have two systems deployed, one for internal and then a Google Doc. That's how the customer would collaborate with us. I was surprised that a company with such good amounts of funding, I thought you would have thought that by now they'd have a way to let the customer interact with the onboarding also. Does your product allow the customer or third parties outside the four walls to interact with it?
It does but there are components of that that we continue to build. Whether they be integrations with other tools that customers, partners or even collaborators and competitors might have access to. I think that's an important path forward. Integrations make life easier for all of us and when they can be native and well-defined, they're better. That particular competitor has achieved really impressive results. They have a fantastic product. It's a narrower product. We are trying to build for scale and for breadth but mostly for ease of customer use, adoption and the integrations that you're hinting at are an important ingredient in that.
Project Management: Everybody in every discipline, no matter their profession or industry, can make use of proper project management.
That makes perfect sense. Thinking ahead, we went from rewind the tape to, " Here we are. This is what you're working on." Let's go forward by a few years, you're back on the show and you said, "Chad, it's been awesome. Here's what happened." Business, personal, whatever, looking back, what's happened over the last few years between now and then?
We will have successfully officially launched our product. While we're in the market, now it's a soft launch. We're learning from customers. We're learning what we didn't build well or right and we're tweaking that before we pour fuel on the fire and begin to market actively to who we believe our best customers will be. That will have been wildly successful. We will have lots of sign-ups and our product-led growth model will work. We are keeping our cost of customer acquisition down, helping people discover and experience our product and opt-in so we solve the churn problem, which plagues all SaaS companies and growth is fantastic. Probably a few years from now, we'll be in active dialogue with either a company that would like to buy us or perhaps be considering an IPO.
I suspect it will be one of those two paths. We have a unique value proposition that can enhance some of the other bigger players in the marketplace and their offering to the marketplace. I suspect that might be the outcome that our investors are looking for. I'd like to make sure it works for our team. We have a great team of fantastic professionals and I want to make sure that their futures are protected and whatever exit we pursue. The financial metrics are fantastic. I want to see our team thrive, succeed and have good choices moving forward whatever that happens to be.
I love that outlook because my original COO worked for us to get the rocket off the launch pad for about 1.5 years. He then was pursued by a cool company. We're still very small. We're not funded, “Go.” Now he owns two houses in Florida. He's about to sell his multi-million-dollar house in Nashville and he's doing pretty darn well but he always wanted to buy a house in Belize and it's $300,000 to $500,000. He's a cool guy and so is his wife. I was like, “That's the outcome that I want for him based on the percentage ownership that he has in the business.”
It's fun to connect with people on that level. Some people, "If I had $50,000, I could pay off all my credit card debt or my kids are about to go to college." Now you put a little bit of that on your back so you don't want it to weigh you down too much. At the same time, it's nice to know that, "That's the path that we're on to help people achieve their unique goals and dreams in life." It sounds like you guys are on that track too so congrats.
We think so. You don't want to get too far ahead of yourselves here and start planning for that big purchase or whatever it happens to be. Every member of our team has their aspiration for what they could do with a positive outcome.
I did a blog that was interesting that may be timely for you. There's a guy named Eddie Wilson whose part of this group called the Board of Advisors and he runs multiple successful businesses. He's had a few that failed. He watched himself on a show and he's like, "I can't think of one," because good entrepreneurs can put that stuff behind them pretty quick. He talks about bricks and the importance of understanding what your brick is. The brick is not, "We signed a new customer. You need to grow to $10,000,” or whatever that is. It's more to do with what their outcomes are. We talked about New Jersey and New York were built around the same time. Both had probably very similar visions. One delivered on the brick by brick, better than the other. New York beat New Jersey when it came to standing up a city.
He talked about Foot Locker, how they were going along in a mediocre way, then they discovered what the brick was for them and that was put the little silver metal thing down and measure your foot. That's the brick because if you come in, I think the reason my guess is if you come in and I go, "What are you looking for?" You're like, "I'm looking to play basketball." "Okay. Let me go show you all the basketball shoes," and they oversell you on something that totally misses the mark. If you do the foot measure, they said their sales increased something like 100%. At some point, I thought it was even 800%.
Thinking about when you're deploying LiquidPlanner, figuring out and that's what we've been working on now in my business called ScaleX is what is that brick? In our case, it's a warm introduction to a prospect or an actual meeting with the prospect. There are two levels of bricks. A smaller brick and a bigger brick. Defining that then getting the entire executive team and all of the managers and the reps on board with knowing what your brick is has nothing to do with adding new customers. That'll happen if I can give you more bricks. I thought that might play in what we're talking about.
I like the story. I'll be looking for a brick for sure.
The last question for our audience is about the role of faith and everybody has a different answer. There's no one right answer. What's your relationship with faith and what role does that play in your life?
It's important. It's part of who I am. I happened to grow up Catholic and still practice as a Catholic but I've had times where I was introduced to a more evangelical Christian participation in faith and frankly enjoyed it. While the discipline, the rigor of the Catholic faith and the tradition is an anchor for most of us who grew up that way, the joy and the celebration of faith in a different environment is more fun and that's what we've exposed our kids to. That's part of a more personal journey than a business journey for me but I don't put my faith in a box. I bring it to work in a way that is founded in the Golden Rule. Treat others as you yourself would like to be treated. That originates from the Bible. I think it's just a great way to be a person and to engage others.
Project Management: Don't put your faith in a box. You can bring it to work, founded in the golden rule, to treat others as you would like to be treated.
Hopefully, it shows up in my leadership in how I'm authentic, how I'm transparent and how I extend trust and expect others to trust me. Ultimately, how I support and serve others. Trying to help them find their path, maybe find their brick and ultimately we're successful together as a result of that support and genuinely caring for each other. It's the Golden Rule foundationally but it has lots of different components as I've navigated life and my profession.
There's a website. I had the founder of On Purpose join us and he's been there for many years. He's got a website and an app OnPurpose.me. You go through and you’re competing purposes and you keep picking left to right, left to right. Finally, you get to the end and mine was embracing grace. To me, the difference to your point, Old Testament is, "You must abide by these 613 rules." I had another guy over to our fire pit, Dr. Jim Wilder. He said, "Nobody can think of all those rules and simultaneously make the right decision."
For a human, it'd be impossible. You'd have to have an AI program that's pretty darn advanced to consider everything. An elevation sermon that I heard talked about the cross and that you live in grace. You were given grace. Coming from that angle of, "I was built exactly as I was meant to be built and I'm doing the best that I can with those gifts." It's a different experience than, "I have to try to abide by the 613 rules." You're going to screw up maybe all 613 before you're done or at least a percentage of those.
Definitely, forgiveness is there. That's a good point. I was built to be who I am and let me just fulfill that to the best of my ability.
I've got a fingerprint in my office. I saw it in Winter Park, Colorado at a house we rented one time. It's got all these different Bible verses. It just reminds you there's only one fingerprint of you. That's important to remember and be true to that fingerprint. This has been a fun conversation. If your company has a need for planning software and intelligent smart planning, get in at this point because this company can invest the time in you and take your feedback. I've worked with companies and we are one of those that when someone asks, "Can it just do these five things?" The odds are we'll give you the five things and I suspect LiquidPlanner can probably do something similar at this stage of growth. Ted would be a great person to talk to if you're running a team or you have any project management requirements. Ted, thanks for joining the show. I'm glad to have you here.
You're welcome, Chad. Best of luck to you and everybody who participates as a member of your audience. I appreciate what I've learned about ScaleX as well. I look forward to finding our paths alongside each other and together.
Thanks for reading the blog. We’ll catch you next time.
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About Ted Hawksford
CEO of LiquidPlanner
Helping teams succeed with our intelligent planning, collaboration and portfolio management tool.
We enable team productivity and effectiveness. Our unique scheduling engine updates workload and schedules in real-time for forecasts you can trust. Dynamic project automation enhances collaboration and helps teams manage uncertainty inherent in complex projects leading to better business results.
