Technology Tools for Community Safety

Wade Erickson (00:01):

Welcome all to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged. I'm your host, Wade Erickson, and today I have Kevin Fray, the field, CTO of Mark43. And we're going to talk a little bit about technology tools for public safety. This is an area of interest that I have. I worked with a product in that was a dispatch tow system was talking with Kevin around that that experience and yeah. So been in this area and really a hot area, especially with the busy life that dispatchers and people in public safety and that, that have technology is always a welcomed addition to their to make their job a little easier. So, Kevin, go ahead and introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about Mark43, what kind of products and services you guys do. And yeah. Then we can jump into the subject.

Kevin Fray (01:15):

Yeah. Yeah, Wade. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for thanks for your time. You know, as you've already said, I'm Kevin Fray go by Fray at Mark43 Field, CTO. And a little bit about Mark 43. So, you know, you already talked about, you know, technology tools for public safety, but we're the first cloud native public safety platform. And what that touches is computer dispatch, records management, and a little bit of the associated models of records management. You know, you know, case management, physical property, evidence, analytics. But you know, my 32nd elevator pitch, you know, for folks that aren't fully familiar with public safety, right? You pick your cell phone, you have an emergency, you dial out, you dial 911, right? It hits a cell phone tower, right? It's going to, you know, identify it in terms of the switch that's going to an emergency, you know, area, depending on your location, it's going to drop off to a public safety access point. Now, there can be, you know, trees to the public safety access point, but ultimately you know, the call's going to get to a call taker. And for the smaller, you know, call centers, it will be a telecommunicator or, you know, call taker and dispatcher. You know, it all depends on, on kind of the size and what the challenges of their population. So anyway the software that they see when the call comes in, like directly on their screen information on the call, information on your location, maybe some advanced information, you know, dependent on some of the partners that we work with, like Rapids os or like, you know, tying into like your Uber emergency app or something like that. So they'll see that information where you come from. They'll see a lot of advanced information in terms of like location data, location cautions. They'll have a map too as well, so they can see on the map where it's coming from. They can see their units on the map, right? Transition to dispatcher, unless it's the same seat dispatcher can, you know, dispatch a unit there. In terms of police unit, it's a fire event. Maybe there's some automated information or automated stations or, or vehicles or apparatus that, that need to go there. So boom, you know, get the units on scene, get them on route, right? Transition over, take, you know, the, the call center hat off, but the field hat on, right? So what the police officer has in their cars. So in their cars, they have what's called mobile data terminal. Mobile data computers. So the software that they see, or the information that transitions from the call to them, right? This can include mapping data too, as well. Chat data. You know, we have mobile applications, right? So the other pitch is that, you know, we're new technology, cutting edge tools that, you know, public safety deserves as it has been a industry that, you know, might have been ignored by newer technology for a period of time. And then ultimately when that officer starts to take information into an arrest, maybe an offense report, maybe the myriad of information that they need to collect, whether it's regional standards, maybe it's local standards, maybe state standards. There's also federal standards. So an easy to use interface that transitions from the, you know, proactive nature of a call to or the reactive nature of a call to, like proactively taking that data down, moving it through case management, all the associations that need to happen, all the rules that happen from a national standpoint you know, making sure it's validated. Again, great user experience, transition to supervisors, make sure things are you know, correct, make sure the data is governed well. And then the analytics and the, you know, physical property and evidence, the compliance that goes with that, the chain of the chain of custody. So, you know, almost similar to healthcare, there's a lot of guardrails and compliance matters. And so you know, again, cloud native software as a service business model, a little bit of a different angle to attacking the industry that, that it, that it wasn't used to. And so that's that's Mark43 in a, you know, 32nd nutshell. But but yeah, yeah. And as field CTO. So I was one of, you know early employees with the first project, our first customer being Washington, DC Metro Police Department and some of the associated agencies within the District of Columbia. But you know, started off doing a lot of support or, you know, what, what would be eventually tagged as like customer success but moved over to the field side or moved over to support sales directly and handle a lot of the procurement activities in terms of RFPs and a lot of the tip of the spear, you know, go-to market, you know, tactical things that need to occur in addition to owning, you know, demo and, you know, product valuation. So ultimately it's a, it's a little bit of a wrapper, you know, again, it's a startup. We all, we all had to wear a lot of different hats. So it's, it's a combination of about, you know, three different work streams. But but ultimately, you know, when a customer wants Mark 43, it starts with my team, and then we move them through the the, the different stages of the buying process, you know, while the field is, you know, putting together the the actual deal. And so, you know, it aligns to about, you know, what I've, what I've kind of highlighted about three priorities, right? So first off, again, you know, leading these solutions engineers, right? Through the buying process, through onboarding, through all of that type of action training, keeping up to date on the software, keeping update on the platform to tip of the spear execution, so you know, how the product needs to be presented, the you know, kind of very specific value proposition that we bring to each region. Because again, each region, each state, you know, has different standards has different technical or technology expectations. The state might you know, you know, supplement the agencies with certain applications. So the actual solution kind of molds to, again, you know, different body of order depending on where you're at. You know, like Bruce Lee says, you know, be like water and then, you know, while you're in the field, right? You know, my theory and, you know, it's really not a theory anymore. It's been, you know, well proven over several hundred times here now already. But a lot of the con a lot of the conversations that we have with the customer, you know, at the, the field level or at the, you know, negotiation level or just through those buying stages, you know, at the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel a lot of those conversations are the same conversations that might be happening at the customer success and customer sustainment standpoint. So there's that field to product feedback loop that, that, you know, we're a very large part of. And, you know, aligning that to opportunities and sales data as well, so that as you look at the future of the product, future of the platform you can, you know, understand, you know, what kind of market and what kind of revenue you may be unlocking. And, you know, have a, have a little bit of a science to that. And then ultimately just, just serve as a change agent. You know, the problems that you have today. Good. Awesome. Right? You know, hit them, keep it moving forward. But ultimately, you know, have to think about the challenges and scaling the company over the next, you know, 2, 3, 5 years as well. So there's, there's a big component of that, of that as well is, you know, you know, as we get, you know, more and more customers as we get momentum in a certain region, you know, what, what is the saturation strategy going to mean for us? And again, getting it down to the tactical level, step A, step B, step C, right? You know, how do we move, you know, through that in a, in an efficient fashion.

Wade Erickson (07:57):

Yeah. And we talked a little bit about this title field, CTO, which you've been sharing a lot of your work responsibilities and how you touch sales. And traditionally, I think CTO is in most companies, is, you know, peripherally tied to sales, but you're very involved with sales. And so can you share a little bit about, and then, you know, field, we talked about cons, you talked about customer success. So it really is a kind of a wrapper if it sounds like, between customer success, sales and the technical aspects. 'cause Like you said, obviously there's a lot of modifications as you mobilize the solution once you sell the deal. Can you talk a little bit about that? 'cause It's a little different than I think other companies are used to, and I think, you know, it's a very, very valuable, like you said title and and position to have. Can you talk about how you're bridging these different than normal CTO and, you know, c SMOs and all these kind of other sales versus tech kind of roles? Because you need to be both, which is rare to find.

Kevin Fray (09:06):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, as, as we talked, you know, about, you know, it's, it's a lot about being that trusted, you know, technical advisor, right? First and foremost. Look you know, public safety you know, they're, they're very service oriented. They're service oriented in their mission, right? And so us as an organization need to be, you know, oriented to their mission as well. It's, you know, a lot of times we, we internally talk about project charters and not necessarily attacking certain functions, but attack, attacking an ultimate outcome, right? And so, you know, when it comes to my team, and you know, how I coach my team and how I individually contribute as well, because, you know, I built the team. I was, I was the first solutions person, zero to one. And then I, you know, we built and scaled around, you know, the activities that, that I did, I supported up to, you know, six reps at one time, at one period, and I traveled, you know, maybe 160, 170 flights that year. So one, you know, heavy emphasis on field, right? Heavy emphasis on being out there, right? Your, your presence as a present you know, you know, no violence, but sometimes they say, you know, Hey, like, like, you know, a city, a municipality's not going to pay you, you know, a million dollars unless they can, you know, punch you in the face, reach out, touch you, right? Like, like, you have to be there. You have to be in the room. You have to not be a jerk. You have to be em empathetic, right? You have to listen, listen to their problems. You have to have great references. There needs to be, you know, customers saying great things about you. So customer success has to be tied into that. And this is where a lot of the cloud native business model really ties in, is that organizationally we can really focus on that personal aspect. We can focus on the service. We can focus on who we are as people and the trust that we bring, and that, you know, we may not get it right the first time, but know that we are working with you, we're listening with you, and we can iterate because it's one code base and our 250 to 300 customers, right? Everyone's using it very differently. But in terms of configurability and, and how we built the platform you know, it's, it's one code base. So, you know, gone is that overhead of having to have version A, B, C, you know, some of these companies have, you know, every, every, every agency is a version of the software. So, you know, gone is the overhead of that and the business you know, the, the inertia that comes with that, right? And so we can, again, focus on being in the field, focus on listening, focus on solving real problems instead of just, you know, trying to match function for function, feature for feature and, and feature cell, right? That's, that's why, you know, I have heavy, heavy emphasis on calling my team solutions engineers, right? Where no excuses, just solutions, right? We're going to be that, you know, tip of the spear, be that representative of the customer journey, right? That first representative. And then, you know, we're going to guide you through the discovery process and through, you know, understanding of not only just our value proposition from a cybersecurity standpoint to a value proposition on configurability to a value proposition on good data and great data out, right? We're through those, those logical phases of, of of understanding how to attack your overall problem. I often say that we're a change management, you know, we're, we're, we're a change management company, disguises a software company. Because again, not just, not just the cloud native part, but, you know, just, just how we approach, you know, the theory of workflows and how we approach, you know, the end-to-end you know, situations that, you know, these, these, these these these officers and, and telecommunicators have to deal with. So yeah, yeah, heavy emphasis, emphasis on the field side, heavy emphasis on, you know, being there for the customer, heavy emphasis on being in person. And and, and, and then again, as I said, kind of, kind of in the, the introduction, we're having a little bit of the same conversations over and over that, you know, maybe the customer success side might have. So, you know, really collaborating between those three spheres of, you know, you know, again customer facing influence, you know, your sales team the folks that are, you know, you know, you know, out there, head down like a linebacker, you know, attacking the pipeline, attacking, you know, you know, the problems that they see. You know, my team and myself, you know, coming in and starting to introduce the product, start to introduce, you know, and get champions at each individual roles because you have to have, you know, multiple stakeholder buy-in when you have an enterprise sales process such as this. And then the implementation press professional services and the specialists that actually come in and sit side by side with the agencies. And then the sustainment success, customer experience team, right? You know, hey, you know, you know, if we configure this this way, if you had this feature, right? So again, just being able to aggregate all that in a, in a fashion that is digestible and, you know, has data, again, regional sales data or pipeline data tied to it. And that just makes, you know, product, it makes the decision a little bit easier because all these product decisions, they're hard, they're difficult, you know, you can run as many, you know, design workshops as you can. But I'm selling data driven decision making for the field. So, you know, we need to be dog this, we need to have data driven decision making internally as well. So it just makes things a lot clearer and keeps us cross-functionally aligned.

Wade Erickson (13:59):

Great. Great. I'd like to pivot to talk a little bit about some of the product development areas. You, you said you're a single platform, which obviously now that adds to a lot of challenges for customization. So you have to customize the, over the, the platform to support maybe some unique customers that come requests that come in, but it has to stay homogenous with the rest of the platform, right? So I would imagine, you know there's some challenges around that in, in maintaining the, a singular code base, which obviously helps a lot with deployments and releases. But, but again, flexibility for the customer that kind of in the CX process, I would imagine there's some pretty interesting challenging things that you come across. So, you know, can you, you, can you share a little bit about some of the insights on how the team handles the challenges around scalability? You have a single platform, lots of agencies. I know when I was doing this, we didn't have all the advantages of cloud and rotating environments and all that. We had to take it down between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM on a Sunday night. 'cause that's when the cars weren't moving as much. So then we took it down for a couple hours, did our release, and then brought it back up. You guys obviously don't have those challenges. You can do rotating servers and releases and stuff. So tell me a little bit about your scalability. 'cause This is not a system that can go down. It's the 911 core system, it sounds like.

Kevin Fray (15:31):

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's almost like you've seen one of my presentations here, you know, you're, you're hitting the nail on the head. You know, and even, even greater than that, software updates. Upgrades, right? Some, some of these, you know, some of these agencies have to take those platforms down. You know, you know, for a whole weekend I was at an agency, you know, running a, they were running a legacy product. And you know, one of my competitors and, and they were running, you know, 26 servers whenever we looked at their, their server farm. And again, you know, whenever, you know, they, they light off or, or KIS the servers, they're going to have to, to, to have a certain pattern to, to updating that. And when you start to look at the portfolio that these public safety agencies and what they're starting to be responsible for is grown over the last 20 years. I mean, look, electronic report writing, like just being able to write a, you know, computerized you know, report is, is a phenomenon in our lifetime. Computers haven't always been very usable, right? This is you know, something that has, you know, rapidly, you know, increased the, the, the end user design in, in the last 20, 25 years here. So one, it's phenomenon in our lifetime. Two it's, again, it's been a cutting edge technology star industry. So, you know, we're there, there's not a lot of cloud out there. You know, there's still a strong education component to this. So there's a lot of greenfield for me. But, but overall, the portfolio of these agencies, they're getting body-worn cameras. They're having to track digital evidence now, right? There's entire, you know, laws and compliance around that. There's even more platform. There's, you know, even more surveillance platforms now, getting into, you know dash cameras and interview room footage. And, and now they're doing like CCTV cameras and real-time crime centers. So when you look at the operational burden at some of these public safety agencies, it's becoming too much for them. Like, they're almost operating as like a software company of their own. And then you're going to have talent challenges, and you have to have retention challenges of, of those kind of talented employees. And so you know, a lot of, a lot of folks didn't get in the IT game to just be, you know, running patches and, you know, upgrading and updating, you know, MySQL and, you know, pulling servers out and things like that. So and then additionally, like, like you said, you know, upgrades and updates ransomware, ransomware is becoming a huge thing, right? It was, you know, very big in the last decade in the, the healthcare system, right? Now, now things are shifting over to public safety. You know, there's, there's a, you know, fairly large agency that's pen and paper right now. And their, their dispatch that, that we're, we're, you know, been talking to there are special events where, you know, they get nervous about cybersecurity. I was talking to another agency, they have an election coming up, a special election, they're shutting down their dispatch system for X amount of time because they're, they're nervous about DDoS attacks, attacks. So there's even a, there's even a greater value proposition to cloud than, than a lot of folks initially realized. But getting into like how we handle, again, those, the features and just kind of talking about the legacy environment and all the patches and all the virgins, right? You know, we, we don't have that challenge. I don't have that challenge, as you've already talked about. We have the flexibility to, to, you know, use servers, no blue-green model. If I'm updating or patching, I can, you know, easily just, you know, flip my elastic load balancer from, you know, the, the old version to the new version after a testing process. So and that also is almost practicing the, you know, business continuity and disaster recovery practices too, as well. So it's a it's, it's a cycle of DevOps and an entirely different concept and operation of business than what any legacy platform or any other company in the industry is going through. So it then allows the value from that is, it allows, you know, rapid iteration. So as I said, is, is, you know, we may not get something right the first time, but I can push a patch next week. I can push a patch tomorrow. I can, I can, you know, dedicate resources to that, dedicate a SWAT team that, and, and get things out in a quarter. We can flood the customer with our services, right? We have people out there, we have people in the field. We we're going through a little bit more of a regionalization of our personnel so people can get there, you know, quicker faster and be more effective. And ultimately, the tax on my development team is the configurability aspect. Like, okay, you know, Louisiana State Police might want to use it in one way versus the way Seattle police uses it versus the way Louisville Metro Police Department uses it, right? And the lexicon even goes with it just the way you name things, right? And that can be based on local laws, local things. It can be based on your previous system, right? A lot of SOPs have just been developed to the way system was, right. And so, you know, you know, that, that just brings it back to me saying that you know, where a change management company disguises a software company from time to time because now you have the platform that enables you to make the changes that you always wished you wanted to do. And it kind of changes the paradigm of, you know, those internal discussions as well as the paradigm of external discussions, because now the data's moving. Well, now the data's well aligned. It's one data model. We're not updating and patching and changing the database and having, you know, esoteric you know, models there. And my schema, you're, it's your data. I'm not, I'm not, you know, holding it hostage. My system is what's very proprietary. So, you know, there's, there's a lot of value out there. I I, you know, kind of round robin went on a lot of things here, but it's, it's again, bringing it back to that cloud native piece that, that, that really enables and empowers, you know, us to, to, to bring to service to the forefront.

Wade Erickson (20:50):

Excellent. Excellent. So a lot of us have you know experienced managing remote teams, and distributed teams. Wanted to ask you a little bit about your team structure and, you know, is there any challenges that you've encountered managing remote or distributed teams, product, product teams, and maybe how have you overcome them to one, keep them all talking to each other, connected as a team, and you know, delivering on your fast changing requirements that are presented to you based on the requests from the field?

Kevin Fray (21:28):

Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So, you know, I'm, I'm physically coming, you know, from, from Washington DC right now, DC proper. And so, you know, our company is, is New York based, right? You know, from the beginning, it's always been we have a, an office in, in Toronto has, has a lot of engineers in it. We, we, we had a strong DC presence just with, with metropolitan dc police force being our, our flagship customer. But you have phases as a company where you start to branch out. So I, I've always been forward deployed to Mark 43, and I'm going on eight years here in a, in a week and a couple weeks here. And then my previous my previous company, Pega Systems, prior to Mark43 business process management platform I was, I was on the road for 50 to, you know, 60, 75%. And you know, and, and even before that, you know, there was, you know, part-time, you know, in office, you know working from home. So it's it know, it's, it's, it's been, it's been something that I've, I've just adjusted to, and again, you know, we kind of scaled the role from, you know, how I, how I, you know, really started off. So it's, it's, it's been very fortuitous to, to, to be kind of forward deployed and, and not have to you know, you know, adjust from that office culture. So as Covid hit, and, you know, our company got to, you know, another phase as you're moving on from a small company, getting more remote, getting more distributed teams it's not just a thing for my team, it became a thing for, you know you know, customer success. It became a thing for implementation. And so as we've matured, it's, it's not just me, you know, it's not just on the solutions team. It's not just on solutions engineers to, to be this remote team. We started to regionalize, we started to align ourselves in pods which i, I learned from previous industries as well, is I was always lockstep with, of course, sales. That's, you know, my number one team that I'm supporting, right? That's the, the folks in the field, right? But the moment a deal stage gets to a level where the customer is starting to envision themselves, like, what does this project look like? Change management is always a thing. So want to bring in implementation, want to bring in professional services consulting as, as early as possible or, or as early as necessary, right? They need to be informed of what's coming, but they need to come in at key times to start being the next or deeper voice there, right? It can't be all on me. It can't be all on solutions, right? You know, trusted advisor, I'm going to bring you my next best friend here, and they're going to start, you know, really walking, you know, your, your deeper stakeholders through, through what, you know, an, an implementation looks like. And that's kind of like the, you know, middle to back phase of like, the logical argument is making sure you start to you know, deal with the, the, the change management you know, arrows that might be thrown in your way or, or detractions from that standpoint. Because again, bringing it back to electronic report writing and cloud native being a, you know, new phenomenon in this industry you know, change, change is always hard. Change is hard for everybody. So that's even another component of our company is like, you know, change management within our PMO and professional services practice. But yeah, yeah, it's we, we have a lot of regional professional services, people just strategically placed within certain regions. My team is distributed between east and west, and we align ourselves both to the regional sales reps that are definitely in region to the regional practice leads. That's the professional services side, which are nearby or within the region. And then and then my team, which kind of you know, again, I have to kind of strategically have them like kind of, kind of crossing over other regions, but you know, it's about listening to your people, spending time with them. One-On-Ones constantly, plus one's constantly you know, tracking dashboards in terms of what you're doing. And then you know, making sure that they have the tools to to operate, you know, you know, mobile or while they're in the field, a whole tooling aspect to this. Like I said, field to product feedback loop, like, no, you're not out there writing the feedback on paper, right? There's digital tools we push the data in, it automatically aligns like request systems. We're not quite one-to-one with the field. So just making sure that from a work stacking standpoint, you know, we, we just have the internal tool to, to track that. And then also that, you know, allows us to project is you know, make sure you're solving for today's problem. Make sure you're getting, you know, your wildly important goals done, but look at the data to drive your staffing, look at the data to drive the new tools that you need to get, look at the data to you know, make sure you're not overburdening your people.

Wade Erickson (25:48):

Excellent, excellent. So I think, you know, as we're coming to the latter part of the show, this is where I'd like to kind of pivot away from the company talk and the tech talk, and talk a little bit about you and some of your personal journey. A lot of our people that watch the show, you know, are in that middle management and, you know, aspire to be a c-suite technical or sales leader. Can you, and I noticed you, you know, had some early you had four years in the Navy it looks like and then you transitioned into private sector, worked through tech, then worked into sales, and, you know, ultimately landed into a c-suite role. Can you talk about that journey and where you think some of the key points were to transition you and, and, and people to look at you as somebody that was, you know, could move into that c-suite chair and, and lead teams at that level?

Kevin Fray (26:39):

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely right. So you know, you kind of hit on it, you know, I was, I was in the, the military was in the Navy for a while, so I was a, you know, 2005 graduate from the Great United States Naval Academy, go Navy and then, you know, got a degree in computer science. You know, I'd always, you know, been very technical leaning, you know, had a, an older brother in, in software development. You know, was, was like a teenager dabbling in software development. So definitely wanted to, to major in computer science. And then as I transitioned, you know, with my commission in the Navy, didn't do anything with, you know, development or computer science whatsoever. You know, I was a surface warfare officer. I was on a ship for a while, did business office, you know, really, really learned a lot about, you know, kind of creating business rules and, you know, had to deal a lot with you know, certain new special missions that we had to fill. So as I transitioned this to from service in, you know, 2009 at the time, you know, there was a little bit of a a downturn in the economy. I, I felt that, you know, while I was in service and, and I was going through transition, I felt that I had done a lot of the due diligence at Footwork. I'm like one of the, one of the earliest people to be on LinkedIn. I had all these contacts, went to a few places, and then, you know, industry kind of went on a downturn. And a lot of the guys that I knew at Yahoo, a lot of guys that I knew at a few other places, like weren't there anymore. So as I was transitioning out, I, I, you know, said, Hey, I'm going to rely on my strengths, my strengths there, you know, my security clearance at the time, my strengths were my military experience. I was looking at Deloitte baring Point. Deloitte had acquired Baring Point and acquired like a big federal entity. So I joined what, what now is called GPS at Deloitte, or Government Professional Services. And I wanted to get back to kind of, you know, computer, you know, technology, it, and so, you know, bounced around a few projects had a great opportunity to join like a, a, a huge project with Department of Homeland Security that was both like, you know, very technology security focused, but also had a huge software component. So really bounced around to, you know, every role I could be on the software side from testing to project management, to development, to, to, you know, PMO, right? So, so there was just a, a, a lot of experience that I did in different spheres of being in a software company and, you know, help build my confidence. I was like, you know, I can do this. But I also wanted to go to grad school and get another, another kind of level to education get, get, get a little bit, you know, you know, diversify. My, my, my leadership diversify education a little bit. So I transitioned from Deloitte into pre-sales to, you know, start getting a little bit more a little bit more money, a little bit more a little bit more benefits to there. And you know, pay for, pay for school, you know, out pocket myself as well as, you know, expand on a little bit more of the sales and the, the softer sales skills. At the same time had, had, had bounced around to a small startup, you know, kind of an energy management startup, got a better opportunity, you know, more, more, more compensation had some colleagues, we were, you know, starting some mobile app development. There was a product there that, that we were working with you know, which, which was again, wearing, wearing many hats between development, between marketing, between you know, you know, getting out there and doing like, you know, gorilla footwork and getting feedback from it, from the field. But the trademark was purchased. But as I transitioned from, you know, Pega Systems to Mark43 at Pega Systems, I was doing a lot of federal, federal sales there. Like the federal side, the government side to Pega Systems was, was a little bit of a new side. They, they generally did their business process management to 1450 mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So we were talking to New York City and they were asking us about social media analytics. And as I was doing more research, a company called Dataminer kept popping up, which I was somewhat familiar with from a lot of the news in dc And then a lot of folks from Dataminer transitioned over to Mark 43, and so it was like right after they had implemented their first customer. So you know, went through my connect you know, learned a little bit more about Mark 43. I understood it from a federal level because one of the software platforms was a little bit of a information system, case management system, records management system. It was very broad, but it was a system that that we were owning in, in one of our DHS projects at Deloitte. So I had a, had a level of understanding there, and yeah, made the, made the leap of faith. There were, you know, a lot of great people very forward thinking, a lot of smart people. And then you know, as I was at Mark43, just wore many hats, took on a lot of challenges, you know, moved from that kind of, you know, customer support role success role being forward deployed there to the sales side, to the growth side. As we started up growth took ownership of a lot of, you know, procurement activities in terms of proposal you know, the technical side of proposal work, you know, built relationships with the, the New York side of the house on the product side of the house. And then then just scaled from there. As the company got hotter, as the product got hotter, got more customers, started to get traction in certain regions, just, you know, went out to those regions, was just trying to be present. But all the same time, you know, again, thinking about the problem that we currently have, but also thinking about, you know, what do I need to do three years from now? What do I need to do five years from now? So I just always stayed ready with the resources or the assets or the unique things that I was doing to win certain deals with field agents, right? I always like built on those assets, expanded on those assets, kind of pushed or, or owned them internally. So if it was, Hey, you know, a lot of cities go through a procurement process, they go through RFPs, they can't always direct by, alright, you know, do we have a tech grid? Okay, well, I answered this tech grid, let's use this as a template and, and, you know, let's, let's commoditize this and move it forward. Or field of product feedback loop, starting to document that maybe it's not aligned opportunities at the time, but we'll do that different, you know, go to market documentation. Just, just always, you know, thought a little bit ahead of, of the current problem or just always thought about, you know, what I was doing at that moment, how can I commoditize that and make that something that, that I need to, to continue to use. And so just stayed ready and every time it was an opportunity to move up or an opportunity to show, you know, what I was thinking three from now or five from now you know, know, I just always had it there and I've been able to answer the question. And so yeah, but ultimately I'm tied to growth. So the size of the company, the movement, the company going to affect the size of my team. And so as that year to year pipeline builds up, then I, I get to build and scale from there. And so you know, that's, that's organic. I appreciate that because if I, you know, got too big too quick, then then you know, puts a little bit of target on you. But yeah, yeah, that's, that's, that's how it happened.

Wade Erickson (33:07):

Well, thanks for that. Sounds like you are willing to take and push your the boundaries of your, maybe even your comfort zone a little bit and take on different things that as you move into leadership roles it becomes more and more broad and less and less vertical. And it sounds like between the jumping to tech to sales, which is not a hu very common jump, so appreciate that summary. Alright, well, we're kind of getting to the end of our time. Wanted to introduce next week's show. And then of course we'll wrap up with you if that's okay, Kevin. So next week we have John Bentley, CPO & co-founder of 10XTS, a FinTech company that specializes in providing universal governance risk and compliance solutions, or controllable or yeah, controllable electronic records. So that's next week, the 21st, 9:30 a.m. Pacific time. And yeah, go ahead and sign up for the event. You'll get notifications there on LinkedIn or whatever social platform you'd like to use. So thanks again, Kevin really appreciate your insights and your background on, you know Mark43. You know, how technology fits in to public sector. The, you know, a lot of folks don't realize how much tech is involved with being a police officer and public service person. And then, you know, the, the, the products that help them do their job better and more efficiently. So thanks again and you know, have a great rest of your week everyone.

Kevin Fray (34:45):

Thanks for the opportunity.