How to Avoid Software Bloat & Get the Most From Your Tools with Allen Cooper, President & CEO at Ancilla Ventures
In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray sits down with Allen Cooper, President and CEO of Ancilla Ventures. They highlight the importance of not relying on a single software tool and advocates for a diversified approach to reduce risks. Drawing from his experience in the healthcare sector, Allen offers valuable insights on managing software tools effectively to support sustainable business growth.
Have a guest recommendation, question, or just want to connect?
Go here: https://www.harvardmurray.com/exploring-growth-podcast
Connect on LinkedIn:
Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehmurray
Allen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/allen-cooper-4a07598/
Allen Cooper
00:00:00
You don't hold all your eggs in one basket with one tool. And that kind of goes back to the foundation of, you know, make sure you get a core tool that satisfies your needs. But having a few extras that, you know, complement the tool you have that do other things that are still core to the business. but don't let your whole business go down because you have every single, activity being done in that one tool because, you know, there is the risk of that sometimes happening, and you kind of think that could never happen to you until it does. And then you're like, wow. I dumbfounded that it actually happened.
Lee Murray
00:00:40
Welcome back to Exploring Growth. You know, as founder CEOs are transitioning into second stage growth. Among the many decisions they have to make, they're usually faced with decisions around software. And usually it's because they have adopted various different platforms in that first stage due to speed and cost to kind of help them get where they're going. And so we want to kind of talk through what that looks like in the second stage.
Lee Murray
00:01:06
Today we get to dive into that conversation with Alan Cooper, president and CEO of Ancillary Ventures. He's an expert in assessing and building software for his healthcare clients, and I think this should be a lot of fun. Welcome, Alan.
Allen Cooper
00:01:20
Yeah. Pleasure, Lee, for having me on.
Lee Murray
00:01:24
Yeah. So before we jump into this conversation, give everybody kind of background, like, tell us about you and your company and what you guys are doing.
Allen Cooper
00:01:32
Yeah. so Intelli ventures has been around for 17 years. we've mainly focused on healthcare and providing them software as a service. We've also kind of, we're born by focusing on data, retrieving data from hospitals and their, EHRs and alike, and building web portals to ingest that. So we kind of have a lot of depth in, data and building applications around that. And then we kind of then took some of that knowledge and started building the last ten year software as a services for the underserved areas of healthcare.
Lee Murray
00:02:06
So love it. Yeah. And, I think a lot of your focus is with healthcare clients, but and looking at healthcare data.
Lee Murray
00:02:15
But as we were talking before, you know, the same problem exists with all kinds of different companies. as they're coming up, usually they, you know, bolt a lot of things together because they're they're just trying to get their product to market and make sure that there's a fit. so they might determine that they need, a scheduling tool or they need, you know, insert whatever tool, and they end up with 15 or 50 different tools all bolted together. And then when they get to sort of that second stage they're having, they're kind of left, you know, like untangling all of that mess and trying to put in some legitimate, software or our tools to help them tomorrow? So I thought first briefly, what we could do is just talk about that first stage company. you know, when you look at those companies, what do you recommend for how they should be approaching software solutions?
Allen Cooper
00:03:11
Yeah. I mean, just from our own experience, you know, we we try to start out by keeping it light and affordable and mainly because, at that time, you know, cash is king.
Allen Cooper
00:03:24
And we want to be able to make sure our, our cash is spent on, on resources that are going to actually, move the needle. And, so we kind of started with that approach. Now, looking back at what we've done, I think what we did that I'd recommend others do differently is don't stay on those platforms too long. You know, use them with a time period of like 3 to 5 years at most, knowing that you're going to probably want to migrate to something that's probably a little bit more robust, something more scalable, and try to think with a lens of, How much does it costing me to have work arounds that labor costs are going to have to be accounted for, versus maybe spending a little bit more money on the tool that actually might be more affordable at the end of the day. and that's the things that maybe I should have probably, you know, early on in our endeavor, probably should have done that sooner. So that'd be one of the recommendations right off the bat, I would say, and then try to minimize too many tools at once.
Allen Cooper
00:04:26
because you may overwhelm the team that has to use them. And then there might be a lot of overhead just trying to do that versus trying to keep it simple.
Lee Murray
00:04:36
Yeah. Training and or them training themselves. So what you're saying is you adopt the tool and it might help in the moment, but it adds additional labor cost or time overhead for someone who's using the tool. Is that right?
Allen Cooper
00:04:51
Yeah. Because at the end of the day, like, no matter what people suggest to you, until you start using the tool, you may not know if it's going to completely align with your organization and and knowing going in that it may be a short term thing, will prevent you from right off the bat customizing something to the point where it's hard to get off the tool. And that's sometimes what happens to some organizations is that they go so custom on some of these things that tailored to the organization that, you know, it's it's a big endeavor to be able to get off the tool. And sometimes they don't even do it.
Allen Cooper
00:05:29
And that's kind of not the right reason to do it, but I can I understand why they don't at the same time. So if you could afford to see if there's an ability for you to adjust your organization to align with the tool a little bit and kind of marry the two together, that might be, a better way for you not to glue yourself to one particular tool, especially if it's not the right fit for your organization.
Lee Murray
00:05:52
Yeah. When you were talking earlier, that was immediately the first thing that came to mind was I could see people getting intertwined with these tools and then they can't leave them, and now they're kind of stuck. So that's definitely something to avoid at that stage.
Allen Cooper
00:06:06
Yeah. And the other thing that I would encourage them, organizations to do is, you know, connect with. I don't call them owners, but maybe client services. But whoever your contact is for those tools, assuming it's big enough that they have one. Yeah. and provide them feedback on some of the things that they may want to enhance on their tool that will benefit you and possibly others.
Allen Cooper
00:06:31
Like, don't hesitate to request those types of things like our clients do that to us all the time. And in fact, we encourage it as, as a, a company that actually produces software. we wish more would do that. And, but sometimes people think that they can't do that. I mean, nowadays with whether it's Google, some of these big organizations, you know, we kind of are being trained to kind of not think we can do that type of stuff and the type of really exactly the case and a lot of the tools out in the market.
Lee Murray
00:07:06
Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's good to have that connection point to to whether it's customer, support team, or the owner founder, you know, of the actual tool. It depends on the size, but but that's okay. That's good. Anything else to say about the first age company and how they should be thinking about, software?
Allen Cooper
00:07:29
at the, you know, at the end of the day, understand that, any software you do get, know that who you have today, may not be there tomorrow.
Allen Cooper
00:07:42
so, you know, just because it may be working great now or maybe it's not working great now because the resources using the tool kind of get conflicting, points of view one way or the other. Try not to marry it to. To who is there today? You know, get their feedback and definitely embrace it. But also understand that, you know, not every tool is ever going to satisfy every single person. It's just virtually impossible, right? You have personality in play at this point. So yeah, for sure.
Lee Murray
00:08:13
Okay. Let's jump as.
Allen Cooper
00:08:14
An owner now clap it as an owner. Just be take feedback. But also, you know, understand that you're running the company and you should do what's best for your company.
Lee Murray
00:08:26
Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's jump to second stage. Now, these companies that, have they've got product market fit, they're trying to scale up, they're building their teams out there naturally, going to have more complexities that are going to come into play. And they're going to need to transition tools or, you know, go into some maybe some customized software or potentially, you know, one thing that you mentioned was, when we were meeting originally, you're talking about, there's a diminishing return on having too many tools and that it creates fatigue.
Lee Murray
00:09:00
I thought that was a great point to to make sure we mentioned.
Allen Cooper
00:09:03
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like, try to keep it to like 1 or 2 tools if possible. because one is if you do have to integrate between the, the tools because of information, it's better to try to minimize the amount of breaking points between the tools and then to the just the pure adoption of that. if you have too many tools, there's a hard learning curve to have. Expect your staff to be able to have to understand three or 4 or 5 tools. You know, I look at like looking at your core business, getting the tool that's going to align 80% of your core business. Does that be 100%? I don't think there's anything out there like that. And and making sure that that's that's good. but then, you know, entertain the possibility that there might be other tools that are best and breeds that might may satisfy something better than your core tool. And I think it's okay to introduce those tools.
Allen Cooper
00:09:59
And if you can again, interface between them if it makes sense. you should do that. You know, I always look at it like having try to have one data source, you know, one like what they call like, centralized data. Yeah. versus having many tools that have the same data notoriously, they're going to be out of sync, and it's going to cause the challenges between what's the truth of the data. And so you want to definitely avoid that if you can. but yeah, if you have the best of breeds that kind of satisfy 8% of your what you need and then, you know, fill in the gaps with maybe 1 or 2 other tools, best of breed. That'd be better than maybe getting one tool. that is, is average in everything, you know, because then you're, you're going to be kind of disappointed in some areas that other tools are going to excel a lot better at.
Lee Murray
00:10:50
That's a huge point there. I think the more syncing that you have to do then the, the more, case that you have for getting rid of all those tools and trying to find something that doesn't have to sync with a bunch of other things, because that's where you're going to have things will not be saying you lose data, or data will be corrupted or whatever.
Lee Murray
00:11:08
So, huge point. so I would assume that if, if they're now looking at, making some of these changes, probably the first step is assessment. how how would you advise a company to assess what to use?
Allen Cooper
00:11:27
I'd first start out with understanding what is your true core requirements as an organization. You know, I, I, I'm one that believes that if you if you go into a, like if you have an idea that we need this, but you don't really understand what your true requirements are, but you just know you need this, whatever that might be. And then you go and approach software vendors. in some ways you're going to be led, you know, you're going to be led to believe what you need is what they're going to tell you you need versus understanding truly what you need as an organization, and then reconciling that with what's out there. And you may be, pleasantly surprised that maybe a tool you thought was going to be the right one ends up not exactly aligning as much as the tool that I put out there, and it'll kind of force the organization to not just accept one review of a given tool, because it's it's definitely painful to do it.
Allen Cooper
00:12:25
I'm not going to deny that looking out there for software's that will help satisfy any of the gaps you have in organization, but if you do it right, it's kind of like, in my opinion, like hiring people, right? Take your time. Make sure that you're, you're you're you're doing the best to diligence to pick the right person in this case, software. Yeah. just because it's a commitment and it's hard to unwind once you've made that commitment, and if you find that you pick something that don't truly like, align with what you really need, you're going to be dissatisfied. Now, you can create a lot of workarounds on a tool that has deficiencies.
Lee Murray
00:13:06
Yeah, and I have had so many conversations with clients. I've been a lot of of these conversations with selecting vendors. And, you know, as it relates to the things that we're working on and one, you know, kind of principle that stuck out to me is to not just take what the salespeople are saying as the gospel, you know, but really use the tool if they'll allow you into the tool and try to use it, even talk with some back end developers.
Lee Murray
00:13:34
If you can speak the language or someone on your team can speak the language, try to get to the root of how you're going to be using that tool and and use it and, and don't just talk to the salespeople, because those salespeople will not be there whenever that sale is done, to help you whenever something, something happens. So that's a huge piece that I've learned, you know, going through this.
Allen Cooper
00:13:56
I agree, I mean, I'm a sales person at heart and. Yeah, and at the end of the day, salespeople are going to give you the best that they can say is about their product. what you need to understand is what's the reality of what they just said to you. Now, for me, as a salesperson might be different than a salesperson. That's, a little bit lower level, because I'm going to tell you probably 100% of the truth, because I know the product. I'm real close to it. Yeah. And sometimes sales individuals, no discredit to them. They're trying to do their job.
Allen Cooper
00:14:31
They just may not know it as intimately as they probably could or should. So they may sometimes accidentally embellish, you know, on something. And, you know, it's just good for you to be able to feel comfortable with whatever tool you're getting. I think to what you just said about, you know, having some type of demo or ability to pilot it for a little bit with no strings attached and stuff like that. And. And that's what we actually tried to do as a software company, is we try to offer a lot of like piloting or baiting of stuff and saying, you know, because we actually want the feedback, frankly. And if it ends up being like a good fit for you, then we know when we have discussions, it's it's going to be meaningful and we know you're going to be more committal long term, then you're going to be in it one year and then you're done. And then that's a lot of wasted energy on both sides, you know. That's right. And the client side.
Lee Murray
00:15:24
So yeah that's right. You guys get the feedback on your side that you can improve. but yeah that's I think that's a huge piece. so if we're looking at assessment and then, then the next question comes to mind is who should be at the table as they walk through this assessment?
Allen Cooper
00:15:42
Yeah. I mean, I think, the core users should be the ones doing the assessment, in my opinion, with guidance from, the technical side if it's needed, right? Some of these tools don't need it, but you know, it's nice to have if need be. But at the end of the day, if you do not get buy in from leadership on the why and then and they're going to basically support you, especially in the bigger tools, the smaller ones, if it's within the department, you may not need that. But whoever is the most accountable person in the organization that impacts whether you should keep the tool or not, it's very important that you get that buy in from them. and, and make sure that it's sometimes what I've seen as well as sometimes leadership on top force a tool down the department's throw, too.
Allen Cooper
00:16:33
And that's also a bad model, even if like, it's a great model to get in the door. But if you don't get that, adoption from those are going to use the tool if that leader ends up leaving, well, guess what, no one's going to use the tool. And now that's right there. That is kind of being wasted, you know. Yeah. So I think honestly kind of marrying up both the top and the users and making sure that both on board I think is very critical. I think you miss out on any one of those will end up actually being a disservice. on the tool, because you may not adopt a tool that really is meant really for you, but you never gave it a chance because you didn't kind of go through the appropriate due diligence. So yeah.
Lee Murray
00:17:15
To take it one step further, if, you know, like you said, that example, a leader leader leaves the tool is less utilized and therefore it can and ultimately hurt the customer. If this is a customer facing tool or interaction, you know, integrated into customer facing, it can ultimately hurt customer success or service or front end sales or however that tool is integrated for sure.
Allen Cooper
00:17:38
100%, 100%. Yeah. So and you know, unfortunately it it happens and you know like as again from our standpoint of company, we've gone burn already on that by like oh great leadership, loves it and blah blah blah. And you know, they're using it. And then also the leader leaves and then like some of the people use it, some of the don't. And then the leader up above never had a good transition of understanding this tool. And then they're like, I don't really think we need this anymore. What is this. Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:18:05
And they don't see the value.
Allen Cooper
00:18:07
Exactly. So, you know, making sure that there's a tight connection between both sides I understand the value. I think it will go a long way.
Lee Murray
00:18:16
So the people that are actually using the tool, that makes a lot of sense, involving them in the process, what about it? How much should they be involved?
Allen Cooper
00:18:25
You know, I in my world, it should always be involved. I mean, health care is a very especially if it's.
Allen Cooper
00:18:32
That's true.
Lee Murray
00:18:32
Yeah.
Allen Cooper
00:18:33
anything with patient identifiable data. only because they're going to be supportive to anything that you're going to release to their clients, because it is kind of like servicing their internal clients as well as we're servicing them as external clients. So I think trying to create a good partnership with them, educating them on kind of what it is so they're aware of it because notoriously they may get calls at their helpdesk support on a tool that they don't support, but they should at least be somewhat knowledgeable enough to say, actually, you should be addressing it over there or whatever. And, not putting them in a bad spot. It's every day. So I think trying to make sure there's a close connection between the two. it may not apply 100% of the time. There are tools out there that are probably not required to involve it, but like most of the bigger tools, I don't think it's a bad thing to include them. I think it's actually a good thing for adoption.
Lee Murray
00:19:37
Yeah. For sure.
Lee Murray
00:19:39
you know, this makes this makes a lot of sense. I think, you know, making sure that those core users are involved, making sure that the front line users, the the people who are purchasing it, right? But the people are actually using the tool, making sure they're involved, having it be in the mix that the natural next thing that comes to mind are assessing risk. And I'll just give you a, you know, kind of a story from my world. one of my clients is in the healthcare space, and I watched her kind of walk through, more recently, a cyber attack that was a ransomware attack. that really just, crushed a lot of these, provider, you know, individual physician provider offices where they literally had to go back to pen and paper to, to do business, which is just crazy that that they had to do that for a matter of months, probably 3 or 4 months. and not, you know, so, so much loss time, you know, integrity with their customers all, you know, because customers don't know what's going on.
Lee Murray
00:20:46
how do you how do you think about risk when you're looking to onboard a new tool. And how does that how does that work from a company standpoint?
Allen Cooper
00:20:56
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's probably a few things to think about on that aspect is one is probably don't hold all your eggs in one basket with one tool. And that kind of goes back to the foundational of, you know, make sure you get a core tool that satisfies your needs. But having a few extras that, you know, complement the tool you have that do other things that are still core to the business. but don't let your whole business go down because you have every single, activity being done in that one tool because, you know, there is the risk of that sometimes happening, and you kind of think that could never happen to you until it does. And then you're like, wow, I am dumbfounded that it actually happened. So yeah. so anyways, for me, you know, like I look at health care, you know, like there's a lot of tools that EHRs out there that do a fabulous job, you know, managing and treating the patients and supporting the providers and alike.
Allen Cooper
00:21:54
You know, they also those same tools provide the same. They provide, you know, support for the non patient driven thing, but not as deep. So why not look at other opportunities out there. You know that's kind of how we got in the game in the first place is looking at ability to, offset and be specialized in certain areas that we know that other tools are not. They offer, you know, good features, but they don't go deep on some of these other things. Yeah. And in those particular examples, at least, the whole system isn't down. Right. You have another tool that's independent, not impacted by whatever may have happened with a cyber attack or the like. And at least you have one less thing to worry about. so that kind of hedges your bets a little bit there. I think the other opportunity is really just making sure that any of the tools that you do have, you know, you do, you know, certain things like disaster recovery and like, take that seriously.
Allen Cooper
00:22:49
Like truly understand that the what if if this goes down, what are you going to do? And and you know, it's possible your backups aren't working. It's possible x y. It's like, what are you going to do. Like what are your what's your plan. And making sure it's documented and and make sure you test it. I mean, a lot of people don't test their disaster recovery because it takes time. And there's a, you know, there's many other priorities out there that they spend their time on. But when this ends up happening, ends up realizing that that this is actually a pretty big priority. If you're down, like you said, 4 to 5 months or whatever. Yeah, that's material. That's not for sure.
Lee Murray
00:23:28
So so we have I have a, some clients in the financial services industry. And so they're naturally, you know, they're highly regulated and they're naturally prone to putting in policies and procedures for things like this, for everything, really, but for things like this in particular, is that something that a company should be looking to their software vendor or, developer to, to give them or to provide, or is that something that they should be doing on their own, or should there be some sort of a partnership there?
Allen Cooper
00:24:02
I think it's the partnership is probably the best model.
Allen Cooper
00:24:05
I think at a bare minimum, they should expect that from their vendor or their business partner to be doing. But I think to ensure that they feel comfortable because they're the ones that really ultimately accountable. Like they can make the vendor or business partner accountable, but their end users are going to look back at them. And if they don't feel like they've done their due diligence to make sure that they hold their vendor business partner accountable, then they're going to the ones are going to ultimately look bad, even if they, you know, make the other place accountable. So I think the partnership is the ideal one because there could be like trade offs as they kind of navigate through, you know, it is. To me, it's all about trade offs or risk and some type of insurance or workaround. Right. So yeah, you know, understanding kind of where your risk points are and how probable they are and really going through that due diligence. Well, make sure you spend most of your energy in the right spots.
Allen Cooper
00:25:03
And then for things that are less risky or less probable, you know, maybe get to when you have time. But I definitely identifying those and working with your business partner would be beneficial.
Lee Murray
00:25:15
Yeah. On a large scale, what comes to mind is more recently, of course, the news cycles like, you know, lightning. So we already forget this stuff, but it probably happened, you know, weeks ago, the airlines, a lot of the airlines were down because there was a Microsoft, I think, plug in or some partner that did updated the wrong thing. I mean, that's a perfect example of what you're talking about, having to do that due diligence of saying, okay, if this happens, then what's going to happen?
Allen Cooper
00:25:41
Yeah, yeah. And you know, that particular scenario, I'm very curious how much communication was done to those that use it to understand this was even a possibility, you know, and that's the thing that I feel bad for those that had that experience, because how vulnerable were they and still potentially are or and it kind of goes back to the initial point of holding your eggs in one basket.
Allen Cooper
00:26:07
Well, look how many companies were impacted by one glitch. You know, it's interesting.
Lee Murray
00:26:14
So it is very interesting to me. What it points back to is this kind of incessant need for growth in the market and in, in your company. That's a, you know, your you have shareholders that you have to report to. And it's this constant calling of new growth. So what's involved with that at the front line is salespeople kind of going back to that remark earlier, salespeople painting this picture. And then what gets left are these things that happen along the way that no one ever really thought about because they're on to the next quarter. Yeah.
Allen Cooper
00:26:49
Yeah. No, 100%. Yeah. It's interesting. It's I just leave it.
Lee Murray
00:26:55
It really is for sure. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thanks, Alan. I think it's a great kind of initial framework for anyone who's thinking about changing vendors up, you know, upgrading their software or transitioning software. if we want to send people your way, where should we send them?
Allen Cooper
00:27:15
Yeah, they can reach me directly at Alan Cooper at retail or and still adventures.com.
Allen Cooper
00:27:23
But I say regulars because that's the product I'm pushing a lot on. Okay, so that's another thing. But Alan, Alan at aDSL adventures.com would be probably the best source.
Lee Murray
00:27:33
Perfect. And are you on LinkedIn?
Allen Cooper
00:27:35
I am yes, yes Alan Cooper at LinkedIn as well. So yep. Cool.
Lee Murray
00:27:41
Awesome. Well this is this is very informative. So thanks. Thanks for.
Allen Cooper
00:27:44
That. Yeah I appreciate Lee.