In this episode of Building Texas Business, I sit down with serial entrepreneur Steve Reynolds for his perspectives on innovation in corporate travel tech.
As CSO of Emburse Inc., Steve shares his journey developing TripBam, an early pioneer utilizing algorithms and robotics to optimize hotel rates. He explains TripBam's strategic transformation from consumer to enterprise software, strengthening the company and positioning it for seamless integration under Emburse.
Steve's experiences navigating acquisitions and a turbulent industry offer cautionary advice. A theme emerges—embracing flexibility positions leaders to overcome challenges and achieve lasting impact.
Transcript
Transcripts are generated by machine learning, so typos may be present.
BTB (00:00):
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yourpodcast.team. Now. Here's your host, Chris Hanslik.
Chris (00:47):
In this episode, you will meet Steve Reynolds, chief Strategy Officer for BU Inc. Steve has built his career in corporate travel technology and in starting various companies over the four decade career. Steve looks for opportunities to be disruptive. Steve, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure to meet you and appreciate you taking the time.
Steve (01:11):
You bet, Chris. Glad to be here.
Chris (01:13):
So there's a lot that I'd love to get into with you. I know that currently you're with a company called BU Travel, but that you started a company before that called TripBAM. Tell us a little bit about, I guess those companies and what they do. What is the business they're known for?
Steve (01:30):
Okay, and just to back up a little bit further, I guess what you could call a serial entrepreneur, TripBAM was my third or fourth venture, kind of lost count, but I've been in the corporate travel tech space for 40 some odd years and TripBAM when we started 10 years ago, we recognize that hotel rates change a lot more often than people actually realize. If you were to create some robotics that went out and grabbed the rate at a particular hotel for a certain date in the future, you'd see that rate changes just about every hour. And what we found is if you just keep watching it, eventually it's going to drop, especially as you get closer to check-in. So we created some algorithms, robotics, whatever you want to call it that said, okay, I've got a rate of 2 99 at the Grand Hyatt in New York.
(02:19):
I'm arriving on the first and departing on the third. I want you to just let me know what it drops and if it does, I want you to rebook it for me if everything is the same room, same bed, same cancel policy, blah, blah, blah. So that's what we did. We originally invented it for the consumer market. We put out a website and we got mentions in the Wall Street Journal and USA today and so on, but sort of my corporate travel buddies called up and said, Hey Steve, we really need you to apply this to corporate travel. And they started writing some pretty significant checks. We followed the money, we pivoted and went all B2B at that point. And so the company grew 40% year over year for the first six years, cashflow positive within just a couple of months. I mean, it was great. It was great. And then Covid came along and kind of took our knees out from under us for a bit.
Chris (03:07):
Covid kind of wiped out the fundamental business model for at least a little
Steve (03:10):
Bit, at least for a little bit. But fortunately, a lot of our customers were paying us subscription fees rather than transaction fees, so we would've stay afloat. We got through Covid and we actually came out on the backside of covid in a much stronger position, both financially and you name it. We were able to do a lot of just cost improvements right sizing the organization. We kind of got a little bit of ahead of our skis, I think in some areas and created some new products. Just all kinds of things, pushed everything out to the cloud and such that dramatically reduced our costs and just we're firing all cylinders and then we worked out a deal with them versus in July of last year to buy the company.
Chris (03:51):
Okay. How does, I guess, what Trip Band does fit within the Ember? Excuse me, overall maybe suite of products or company strategy?
Steve (04:03):
Yeah, so Ember provides travel and expense to the largest of companies, to the smallest of companies. And what I mean by that, everybody, when you go, you have kind of a booking tool to start with. Most folks are familiar with Concur. We have our own, the reservation gets created, it then needs to be watched, monitored, audited, improved upon. That's kind of where we fit in. So before the money is spent, we actually see if we can actually do better than what the traveler did on their own. Travelers are not going to check the hotel rate every day. They're not going to check their airfare every hour. They're not potentially going to book the preferred property within a particular city. We fix all that before the money's actually spent. We then push all that to mobile. So you've got a companion app in your pocket where the traveler gets a ton of destination content specific to that company.
(04:53):
So I'm going to New York, I'm staying at headquarters. What hotel should I stay in? I need to go take a client to dinner. What restaurants do you recommend? All kinds of other stuff, including safety and security perspective and so on. Then the data is all captured and fed into an expense report so that your expense report, if the traveler is compliant, it's kind of pre-created and pre-approved. So the traveler in a lot of cases doesn't have to do anything, and if they're compliant all the way throughout, they could actually kind of be paid as soon as their plane hits the ground. Oh, then it all feeds into reporting and analytics so that we can improve your travel program, identify additional savings opportunities, find some fraud issues, detect all kinds of other stuff that might be a problem. We also offer a card product if you don't have one, and that's kind of the travel plus expense ecosystem that we provide.
Chris (05:48):
That's fascinating. I obviously wasn't aware that something like that existed, but I can see how large companies with a lot of employees could see the benefit and realize a lot of savings from those services.
Steve (06:01):
When you combine travel with expense, some kind of magic happens in that we have enough data and insight to be able to start pre-filling out that expense report. Otherwise, all we're counting on is card transactions and receipts, and that's really not going to do the trick. But if we can get that card information augmented with the receipt scanning and everything else that we do now we can really do a nice job of pre-filling out that expense report. So really all you have to do is add mileage, hit click, and you're submitted.
Chris (06:30):
So you mentioned that you've been in this industry for 40 plus years. I'm curious, how did you first get started in the corporate travel tech space 40 years ago?
Steve (06:41):
It was just by happenstance, I guess you could say. I was originally started as a programmer for Texas Instruments, got accepted into their executive program, which meant I could go off and get an MBA and then come back to ti, but quickly realized that the consulting firms were paying a lot more. So I ended up with Ernst and Winnie at the time with Ernst and Young, and my first assignment was with a travel agency in Houston, Texas called Life Go Travel, which doesn't exist anymore. The owner of that company hired us to come in and build some technology. It really put 'em on the map, and he got tired of paying the bills and seeing the hourly checks that we were charging. And so he approached and said, Hey, do you want to come work for us? And I'm like, well, that never thought about working for a travel agency. That doesn't sound all that exciting. But he said, look, what if we created a company? We'll spin it off and we'll give you some equity. And I'm like, okay, now you're talking. So we left. We started up a company called Competitive Technologies, and all of it was bought by American Express Travel two years later.
Chris (07:40):
Oh, wow. So unquestionably you had a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit going way back then to see an opportunity in it.
Steve (07:49):
And a lot of it is just kind of, I guess my personality. I don't do well at big companies. I really struggle. I get so frustrated at just the lack of progress or the lack of innovation or the speed at which things happen. So I tend to sort of find an excuse to hit the exit button usually within a year or two.
Chris (08:09):
So you said something in that response that I want to talk to you about, and that's innovation. I think there's such a common theme I think with entrepreneurs about, and innovation can mean so many things. What do you think that you've done as you've built several companies, as you mentioned, to create or foster and nurture a spirit and environment of innovation?
Steve (08:33):
A lot of it is just becoming a really good listener to the buyer, to whoever the customer is. And then when they say things, there are certain kernels that are aspects of what they say that you just go, oh, wait a minute. Okay, can we go back to that? That sounds important, this level of frustration, why does that frustrate you? And if you have engineering and development in the room, when those things are said, oftentimes some real magic starts to happen. And the creativity, the innovation just comes out naturally as, wow, we can solve that problem. That's not that hard. Let's go do that. So that's on the B2B side, that's kind of the formula that I'd like to have. I've got a group of customers and buyers that I really retrospect their opinions. We talk about issues within the industry on a regular basis, and oftentimes through that conversation, something falls out as far as a new feature or product, something like that that we can start working on The BC side. Go
Chris (09:30):
Ahead. It sounds like there's a function there of asking the right questions and really listening
Steve (09:37):
Well, and just most big companies or companies, they try to protect the dev engineering. They're like, oh, we're not going to let you talk to customers. You guys sit over here in the back room and we'll come to you with sort of a priority or roadmap of what we think is needed. And I feel like that's just the wrong way to do it. You've got to get the dev and the engineers and the programmers in the room to hear the story, otherwise you get this telephone tag of what actually gets built isn't quite what the customer wants or is even asking for. And for most companies, that's really hard. I don't know why, but it's like we can't allow that to happen, but that's just not the way I operate.
Chris (10:16):
Well, I mean it makes sense. The people that you're asking to solve the problem probably need to hear what the problem is firsthand. Right,
Steve (10:22):
Exactly. And then it's oftentimes the dev guys are like, they're coming up with much more creative solutions. If you just hand them a requirement sheet or spec sheet, they're like, oh, okay, this is going to take a month. But when they're involved with the client and they actually hear what the true problem is, oftentimes they're like, oh, I can knock this out overnight. I'll have a solution to you by tomorrow. It's just a night and day sort of sense of urgency or the emotion around creating the solution they're bought in at that point when they hear it directly from the client and they can be the hero.
Chris (10:53):
Well, when you think about that and getting the right developers and the right team together, what have you found to be successful as far as what to look for in building the right team and then keeping the team together?
Steve (11:08):
So fortunately for me, I mean through all of these different companies that I've started, I've been able to get the band back together multiple times. A, because I'm a big believer in sharing the equity, let's get everybody, if not equity, at least options, so that when there is an exit, everybody benefits. And they've all seen that so far to date, knock on wood, I haven't had an unsuccessful exit where we've had to turn out the lights or whatever. My shareholders have all made money typically around five x to 10 x on their investment, which has been great. So it's easy to get the band back together. But what I also have found out is there are certain programmers that are passionate about programming and others that are just taught programming, and there's a night and day difference on the result. If they're passionate about it, the results come out quick.
(11:59):
I get creative solutions that nobody would think of. They're usually extremely low cost, and it's just so much better than if I have someone that's college taught I'm doing this because it's a paycheck, and I took this degree because that's what somebody told me too, and I was good enough to get a B in college on all my programming courses. But at the end of the day, if their heart's not in it and they're spending their time just on the side weekends and nights learning new stuff, they're not going to be very good. So give me one or two of those that are passionate and I'll put them against 10 to 20 of those that are school taught and we'll kick their ass every time. Yeah.
Chris (12:43):
Well, again, I think that transcends all industries and disciplines, the key being passion. I think you as the leader are the one that has to start with the passion and then find people that share that passion to get to where you're talking about where there's that flow within the organization.
Steve (13:03):
Yeah, I think development's a little bit different. I mean, you're not going to find anybody super excited about accounting or I don't know the other aspects of it, but with the development, there's guys that just get so into it, they're programming on the side, they get into hackathons, they want to prove that they're smarter than the guy next to 'em and just constantly looking for the next challenge and just coming up with those creative solutions. I don't know of any other discipline that really has that level of it, but there might be, I mean, I could be wrong.
Chris (13:34):
So just going back and maybe not the first venture where you and I think the travel agency in Houston started, but maybe I'm just curious to know as you began some of these startups, maybe sharing some of the lessons learned through some of the challenges you found in starting that venture, whether it be raising capital as an example, or any other challenges that may have come about, but I think that capital raise can be one in the startup that some entrepreneurs find daunting and maybe can't solve and then never get anything off the ground.
Steve (14:06):
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think first off, just wait as long as possible to raise capital. Most of them kind of build an MVP, which just kind of barely works, and then go out and try to raise money on it. And whenever you go down that path, you just end up way undervaluing what you have. And I know people get in certain situations where they just need to have a check or it lights out. But if you can wait until you actually have a client actually are generating revenue, actually having positive cash flow, whatever, and then you can show someone, look, we just need to add fuel to the fire here. This is not about keeping the lights on. This is about generating growth. You're going to have a dramatically better outcome. The other thing I found out is when you take the big check too early, you start making really stupid decisions.
(14:55):
You start hiring attorneys that are expensive. You hire A CFO before you need it. You have an head of hr, all kinds of stuff and overhead that's just not necessary. And over time, it makes you less and less nimble because you're so worried about payroll and less focused on just delivering a product that has a bunch of value. Keep your day job, keep working nights and weekends, wait as long as possible. I mean, I always said, look, cash is like oxygen. If you run out, you're going to die. So hang on to it with both hands. I mean, beg, borrow and steal from friends and family and whatever to just get stuff needed. If you needed a contract, go out on the web and search for a co polar plate contract. It'll be good enough to get you started. Or find someone that's a buddy, that's a lawyer that's willing to do some pro bono work and return maybe for a little bit of equity, stuff like that. Just hang on to that cash as much as you can for as long as you can.
Chris (15:52):
Well, I think there's a lot there that someone can learn from. Obviously speaking as the chairman of a law firm, I can't endorse legal Zoom for the startup, but I understand your point. We talk to clients a lot about, especially in the startup phase, maybe helping them get going and being smart about how they spend their money, but make it an investment in getting at least a sound structure. And they may not need the full blown set of legal documents, but I can promise you, I've seen people start on legal Zoom and wish they hadn't a couple years later when things were getting a little tight. But I understand your point there, but conserving cash is important to get off the ground.
Steve (16:34):
Yeah, I mean, you don't need to come right out of the gate being in an ink and incorporate it in Delaware and pay all the fees, whatever, to make that happen. I mean, just start out as a low cost LLC, and then when you're ready to sort of raise capital and become a real company, you use part of that capital to convert at that time.
Chris (16:53):
So you had mentioned earlier, I guess going back to kind of TripBAM, having at least initially a pretty profound impact, but then turning it into a positive, and I kind of want to take you back to that time and maybe dig in a little bit deeper. I think it's a beautiful lesson of something where a lot of people may just throwing up their hands because travel stopped, et cetera, which decimate your business specifically to you. But then you said, we actually learned from that and became a better, stronger company because of it. And you've mentioned right sizing the organization stuff, but could you share a little more detail some stories from that our listeners can learn from if and when their business faces something similar?
Steve (17:35):
Yeah, I think first off, being fairly quick, you can always hire people back, but if you keep 'em on the payroll and you start burning up cash just way too fast or you're starting to trend towards in the red, you just got to pull the trigger. Nobody wants to and nobody likes to do it, but it's really nobody's fault. It's just something as an executive or CEO you have to do or a founder. So that's one. Second is as companies grow, you kind of make stupid mistakes along the way. You get kind of inefficient. You don't anticipate the level of growth that might've been reality. So going back and saying, all right, take a step back, let's catch our breath. What should we have done to kind of handle the scale better? And so for example, just moving everything to a cloud environment, putting it out to bid, switching from one cloud provider to another, whatever it is, you can just generate or reduce your costs dramatically rather quickly. If you just focus the time on it, everybody gets so white hot focused on growth and the next client and the revenue they forget to look in the rear view mirror about. There was a lot of costs we could have taken out, which could have generate even more cash going forward.
Chris (18:44):
Hello friends, this is Chris Hans, your building Texas business host. Did you know that Boyer Miller, the producer of this podcast is a business law firm that works with entrepreneurs, corporations, and business leaders. Our team of attorneys serve as strategic partners to businesses by providing legal guidance to organizations of all sizes. Get to know the firm@boyermiller.com and thanks for listening to the show.
Steve (19:15):
So we pulled the trigger pretty quick. We right-sized the staff. We had a pretty good, and fortunately for us, this is the other, we lucked into this, our customers, for whatever reason, decided they wanted to pay a subscription fee rather than maybe a percentage of the savings or a transaction fee to where what they were going to spend would fluctuate month over month by paying a subscription fee, they could budget it and they were going to get a better return on investment. So we did most of our deals that way and thank God we did because when covid and everything went into toilet in April of 2020, we still had cash coming in the door. So we were actually stayed cashflow positive because we kind of right-sized the staff fairly quickly. And then coming out of covid, as the revenue started to ramp back up and our sales started to continue, we were just on a much better platform that would scale after it because it was just all right sized and efficient and whatever. And at the same time, we added new product. So we had a two year kind of, alright, just keep the lights on. Market will come back around. We added an air re solution. We added a bunch of analytics to audit contracts and to benchmark performance so that we had a whole bunch more to sell coming out of covid than going in. And so that caused another year of explosive growth as a result.
Chris (20:34):
That's great. So yeah, obviously part of that is give some deep thought to how you price what your product. So that subscription base versus transaction for you sounds like a very, maybe it didn't seem as meaningful at the time you made it, but it turned out to be
Steve (20:50):
That's a tough one. If the ROI of your product is pretty clear, if you've got a rate of 2 99, I drop it to two 50. I've got $49 per night in savings. If you pay me a couple of bucks, okay, here's the ROI and we could run some pilots and all kinds of stuff to prove that out. So that makes it really simple and we try to hit, look, I need a ROI that when they take it to their boss, the guy that's doing the budgets, it won't cause all kinds of frustration and concern. So four to one is usually the minimum. A lot of our customers, the larger ones are getting eight to one, 10 to one. So you could say, look, you've probably underpriced it, but that's okay. We will claw back some of that over time. When it's a product that's the ROI is a bit fuzzier, you've just got to somehow convince the client that this is the potential savings they're going to guesstimate. And then from there, work backwards to a price, which gets you back to that four to one ROI. So if I think I'm going to save you five bucks a transaction, I'm probably going to charge you a dollar to dollar 50 is what I'm going to aim for gate again to get to that four to one kind of savings estimate.
Chris (21:59):
So part of that goes, I think in building that customer base, really focusing on strong relationships. Talk a little bit about that and what you've done. It sounds like over the course of the various businesses, you've done a good job of creating some very good partnerships and alliances. What are some of the things you think that have helped you foster that and keep those for so many years?
Steve (22:25):
I think one is you got to underpromise and overdeliver. So if they're going to sign up, don't make 'em look bad or stupid to their boss. The other one is identifying the influencers in the market. So I'm sure every industry has some individuals that are kind of on the bleeding edge willing to try new things. And if they do and it works, they've got the microphone or the megaphone to tell a whole bunch of others. So fortunately for me, I've been able to identify who those influencers are. I've got a reputation for just delivering as promised. So when they sign up, they have confidence and then they tell their peers. And a lot of our sales in the large enterprise market are peer to peer networking. It's not from email campaigns or other stuff that we do.
Chris (23:10):
Part of that's the old adage of just do what you say you committed to do when you said you committed to do it right.
Steve (23:17):
Just delivering is promised, don't sell me a can of goods and all this great wonderful thing. And then when in reality it's just not there, don't make 'em look stupid. That's the key one. I mean these are after 40 years, they become, we have some pretty tight relationships with these folks and I want them to keep their job and we want them all promoted and moving on to the next big role because when that happens, they just take us with them and we just keep getting bigger and bigger.
Chris (23:45):
You mentioned about keeping your words the band back together and you'd be able to do that hiring some of the right people and incentivizing the right way. Any insights into what people could think about when they're looking at their team? One trying to, I guess evaluate whether they have the right people and then finding the right ways to incentivize them to kind of keep that core group together.
Steve (24:10):
To me, if they feel like they're a part of a team and they understand the value they're providing to the customer and they see that customer's appreciation, they're in the conversation with the client. And that's easy to do at a small company because who else are they going to talk to? You got to bring the dev in engineering, but when you start layering and bifurcating and have people in engineering back there in the back room kind of stuff that don't talk to clients, that's when it gets a lot harder. But when you get them into the conversation and that sense of this is my company, this is my reputation, I'm a part of something here that's growing and doing well and whatever, it's not that hard. It's really not that difficult at all. It's just everybody wants to be appreciated and feel like they're part of a team.
(24:58):
So that's the formula. I mean, I could throw money at them, but ask my employees, I mean, I am not the guy that's writing big checks to hire people, whatever. I'm like, look, we're going to pay a reasonable salary. You're not going to be broke. But we're in it for the long-term game. And so we want to keep the cash in the company so that we don't have to go do another capital raise, which is going to dilute all of us. And so your equity just keeps getting smaller over time and the guys that actually make the money are the investors. This needs to be a collaborative team effort. So they get that.
Chris (25:33):
Yeah, I think that transparent communications is key. So again, they understand their role on the team, they understand what the goal of the organization is and how they can help further that.
Steve (25:45):
It's always been kind of fire slow, fire quick as well. The people, everybody makes hiring mistakes. It happens all the time. And when you hire someone within a couple of days, you're like, this is not feeling right. Don't let it just sit. Don't let it be two years later when you actually work 'em out. You have to pull the trigger fairly quick because it messes up the whole culture of the company. Oftentimes, especially at a small company, it can create some real problems.
Chris (26:11):
I mean, that may be the most sage advice and I think maybe the most consistent that I hear from entrepreneurs and business owners. It's been my own experience too, that kind of fire. Don't be slow to fire when you know made a mistake and it's the hardest, maybe one of the hardest ones to do because you're dealing with people. I spoke to someone yesterday and they were like hired someone, had some uncertainty and literally what I learned was to trust my gut because on day one that they started in a conversation, went, oh my God, this is a huge mistake. Tried to play it out, tried to make it work, and guess what? It didn't.
Steve (26:47):
Yeah, the thing is, I don't believe resumes anymore, and I don't believe LinkedIn pages at all, especially when it comes to higher dev and engineering. It's just anybody can put whatever language they want and say they've got a ton of experience. You've got to figure out a way to validate. And most of our hires, there's kind of referrals and peer-to-peer sort of networking. If I find someone, I can usually find someone they know, especially in the Dallas market where we are that's worked with them at a prior company, that sort of thing, and do some back channel checking is what really pays off for us. And we know the rock stars. We know the rock stars, but they're not that hard to kind of pick out. It's the ones that are kind of questionable that you just got to do your homework and don't count on the resume.
Chris (27:28):
That's a really good point. It's a hard thing to do though, and it may be easier and programmers, but I totally agree with resumes and profiles can be massaged, but it's sifting through and through the smoke to really get to what's behind the curtain.
Steve (27:45):
Yeah, and zoom calls, I mean, people hire on Zoom calls or whatever. I'm like, dude, you got to get them in the office face-to-face, go to lunch, have a couple of face-to-face interactions before you actually bring this person on board, make them pass a coding test or something tangible. Don't just look. They're very nice people. They all look great on a phone call or a zoom call, whatever, but that doesn't cut it.
Chris (28:15):
Yeah, I mean no substitute for personal interaction and seeing how people show up, right?
Steve (28:21):
Yeah. The other thing is since we're on a startup mode where everybody's looking at kind of the potential for equity, I'm like, look, if you're as great as you are, why don't you come on board for a month on a contract basis, let's see how it works out and we'll go from there. And you really get a feel for someone and how well we like to try before we buy, let's put it that way. That's one way to do it.
Chris (28:44):
So let's turn a little bit and just talk about specific leadership styles and how you would describe your leadership style and maybe how you would describe it today versus maybe 20 years ago as you were emerging as a leader and how you think it's changed.
Steve (29:01):
Oh my god, it's night and day. So first company, way back when, maybe it comes to surprise or not, but it was a coat and tie environment and okay guys, we've got to put on the ties and whatever. That was just so stupid. And checking office hours and all that crap. And tracking vacation time just seems so silly Now, if you can get the job done, I don't care what you wear, I don't care what you look like, I don't care where you do the work. I don't care if you have to take vacation on a pretty regular basis for whatever reason. I don't care if you're going off and disappearing to watch your kid play soccer, I do not care anymore. Just here's the job. Here's kind of an expectation as long as I understand you're trying hard to get it done as quick as possible, we are good.
(29:53):
This kind of a thing. So all that other stuff was just noise that was just stupid. Anyway, I mean back when I started in this, I mean programming and development and all that, and the whole tech world was fairly new, so nobody knew what they were doing or how to manage these folks. And it evolved over time, but fairly quickly, I mean by company two ties were gone by company three, office was gone. I mean I've been virtual for 25 years. Unfortunately we had offices, but I think they were a waste of money, but we did it for optics more than anything.
Chris (30:29):
So it sounds like more a traditional and somewhat of a command and control starting out to now a little much more flexible and providing autonomy As long as people deliver on the expectations that they're communicated with,
Steve (30:44):
Which comes down, you can just hire the right people. If you can get that sense for what the kind of folks that are going to do. Well. So for example, if I see that you've got, you spent 20 years at a really big company, you are not going to do well at a startup. I could guarantee you, you're used to other people doing work for you. You're just kind of the sit back in your office and sort of tell folks what to do. That ain't going to happen. You need to get your hands dirty. You might have to write code, you got to do PowerPoints, you got to do word docs, all that stuff yourself. Big company folks just tend to lose that ability, let's say, or it's beneath them and that's not going to work.
Chris (31:24):
Yeah, I mean it's almost, that's not in my role mentality versus everything is in everyone's role mentality, right? It's about getting a job done no matter what it takes.
Steve (31:35):
And I think what drives me crazy at a big company, because unfortunately for others, I tend to poke my nose into others' lanes and I get told a lot, Steve, stay in your lane. Nothing bugs me more than to hear that. But that's the big company way.
Chris (31:52):
So you've gone through a few companies and now I guess inside of a larger company now, are you finding it still easy to have that mentality of flexible leadership and innovative environment
Steve (32:08):
In the new company? I would have to say no. It's kind of as I expected with other acquisitions, you start this kind of, here's how it happens. However, Emburse, I believe is trying hard to carve out a role where I can exist, let's put it that way. So my title right now is chief strategy Officer, and it's a bit nebulous kind of by design. I can sort of make it what I want and as a result of being chief strategy officer, I can get outside of my lane and people can question it. I'm like, everybody needs strategy. That's my title. I'm going to get in your lane kind of stuff. So I tend to bounce around to lots of different projects, objective, so on. I kind of help make sure that it's cohesive across this travel and expense story. But at the same time, I don't have a lot of direct reports, which is great because that usually doesn't go too well either. So far so good. Fingers crossed.
Chris (33:08):
That's to hear. We kind of covered the challenges of Covid. If you think back prior to that, any other challenges along the way with the first two or three companies,
Steve (33:20):
Everybody?
Chris (33:21):
Yeah, I think some of those are the best lessons we learned or some of the challenges we go through. And I'm just curious to know if any kind of lessons from a challenge that you could share with the listeners that might help them when they face something similar?
Steve (33:36):
Oh my God. I mean, everybody's made mistakes and if they or got lucky along the way, and if they don't admit that they're lying, I mean some of the bigger ones, nine 11 we were doing, we had a solution that was processing about 80% of all corporate travel reservations made in the US nine 11 hit, and we went to zero within about 24 hours. So that was kind of a gut check. Fortunately, travel bounced back fairly quickly, but it made us take a step back and realize how nimble we were. If something like that were going to happen again. So that's one. And there's all the kind of day-to-day stuff. I mean, there's fraud, there's employee HR issues that happen. I'm not going to get into details on that, but Right, for sure. You just kind of, all right, let's deal with this. Don't just look the other way and take care of it. I think the latest, I mean the big one right now is just the whole third party hacking and getting into your network and holding you hostage, stuff like that that's made everybody just super anxious and nervous and to the point where companies are shutting down their network so much that individuals can't do the job, which is causing concern. What else are you going to do? I mean, if some employee can click on a link and bring down your network to just turn off email,
Chris (35:05):
You're right. It is creating such a challenge. Everybody, all companies are being attacked every day from all kinds of angles and it just takes one. But you also, you can't operate out of fear and you can't let it stop you from doing your business.
Steve (35:20):
Well, they say there's two kind of companies out there. There's those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked. So it's just got to keep that in mind and I think it's fairly true. I think it's just almost too easy to get into someone's network and poke around and see what's going on these days.
Chris (35:38):
That's so scary. But I thought you were going to say those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked, but I guess
Steve (35:44):
Already have, you just dunno it.
Chris (35:46):
Well Steve, I really loved hearing your story. It is a fascinating industry and one that you don't really hear much about, but you definitely sounds like for 40 years you've been crushing it at it. So congratulations to that.
Steve (36:00):
Well, thanks for that. But also, one thing people don't know about corporate travel is that it sits on a backbone of legacy technology that's probably 40 years old that has not changed. The GDSs are antiquated, the travel agency systems are antiquated. It's not that hard to come up with something innovative and new in this environment. So I just got lucky to where I got into it and I'm like, this thing is so bad. I mean, anything you do is going to be innovative. And so we just started coming up with new stuff, solving client's problems, and it just kept evolving from there.
Chris (36:36):
Yeah, that's really so many entrepreneurs I talked to, it is what you just said, solving the customer or client's problem. Because what I said earlier, it goes back to asking the questions and listening and then trying to solve that problem. So many great ideas that come from that across so many industries
Steve (36:53):
And just set up a little process to where you talk with your customers on a regular basis or a group of clients or people you trust and it just happens naturally. It's really not that difficult.
Chris (37:05):
Well, let's turn to a little bit on the lighter side. Before we wrap this up. I always like to ask people like yourself, what was your first job?
Steve (37:13):
My first job, let's see, I worked at a pet store in junior high. Well actually first job was Mowing Yards, right? So every kid did that just to get my allowance money. Then I worked at a pet store in junior high for a short period, but fairly quickly realized waiting tables made a lot more money. So I told a guy I was 18 when actually I was 16 and they never really checked. They hired me as a waiter. I was actually kind of a part-time bartender. So I was serving liquor in Houston, the strawberry patch. I probably get the bit trouble back when I was 16 years old and just made a ton of money as a high schooler. So that was kind of the first, and then got into computers and writing code at a very early age. I was part of a program at Shell where they gave us mainframe time to go in and kind of play around and then went off to Baylor for computer science and then went to, then went to a and m for grad school.
Chris (38:11):
Very good. Very good. Okay, so being a native Texan, do you prefer Tex-Mex or barbecue?
Steve (38:17):
That is not a fair question because both are pretty dang awesome. But being in t, I think we've got some of the best barbecue on the planet. So pecan lodge here in Dallas is I think the best. And there's a lot of Tex-Mex though. That's really good as well.
Chris (38:34):
Yeah, well, I agree on all points. I haven't heard of Pecan Lodge before, so I'll have to check that one out.
Steve (38:39):
Yeah, it's in deep El, so next time you fly in, go in out of love field and it's not too far. It's a 10 minute try from there.
Chris (38:46):
Deal noted. And then last thing is you may early in the career probably never did this and maybe have done since, but if you could take a 30 day sabbatical, where would you go and what would you do?
Steve (38:57):
I actually got a 30 day sabbatical, so a guy hired me or not hired me, but when he brought me on board to run a company, he said, Hey, I threw in there just, I read it in a magazine that it was the hot thing for techies to ask for. So I threw it in there and they accepted it. I guess they thought I'd never make it to my five-year anniversary. Anyway, I did and I took the kids and family went all the way throughout through Europe. So we went to Italy, Paris, France, Austria, Switzerland, whatever. Just really unplugged for that 30 days. Actually, it was a 90 day sabbatical is what I took. So I got a little bit more time. Yeah, it was great. It was great. So if that were to happen today, I'd probably look to do something similar, but nowadays, if I want to take 90 days, I probably could. Just got to ask for it.
Chris (39:46):
I Very good, very good. Well, Steve, thanks again for taking the time to come on and loved hearing your story and all the innovation you brought to the travel industry.
Steve (39:55):
Alright, well thanks for having me, Chris. I really enjoyed it. Good conversation.
Chris (39:59):
Thanks. Well, we'll talk soon.
Steve (40:01):
Okay. You bet.
Chris (40:05):
And there we have it. Another great episode. Don't forget to check out the show notes at boyarmiller.com/podcast and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at boyarmiller.com. That's it for this episode. Have a great week and we'll talk to you next time.
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