Leadership, Community, and the Next Era of ERP

[00:00:00] David: Welcome to the Acumatica ERP podcast. Today we're joined by Acumatica, CEO, John Case. John has led the company into an exciting new era of growth, most recently with the Vista Equity Partner acquisition and John's passion about spearheading small and mid-size businesses. Under his leadership, Acumatica has sharpened its focus on customer success, innovation, and culture. We'll dive into what's next for Acumatica and how its community of customers, partners, and developers is building the future of business together. Let's get into it. Hi, John. Welcome. Thank you for being here.

[00:00:42] John: Thank you, David. It's good to see you.

[00:00:44] David: Yeah, you too. Super excited to be launching this new podcast. It's such an important time in Acumatica history. We reached a big milestone this year with a Vista Equity partner acquisition. Would you explain to our listeners what that means for Acumatica and how it reflects the growth we've experienced as a company?

[00:01:01] John: Oh yeah, sure. We were owned by a different private equity firm, a company called EQT, for about six years, and we kind of came to the end of our natural cycle with them. These, you know, these private equity funds they buy and they sell companies.

[00:01:15] John: And we went out to the market privately and, you know, talked about a whole range of potential. Vista buyers came in very aggressively and wanted Acumatica very badly. And, and so, you know, paid for the privilege. The great thing about that is what they're interested in and what we're interested in are basically a hundred percent aligned.

[00:01:32] John: Which I'm, I'm very, very keen on. When I talk to 'em about what they want to do, how it relates to us, they really value the things that we're good at. They value our product, they value our channel. They value the industry opportunity that we have. They value our, our tech stack and how clean it is.

[00:01:48] John: And so what's exciting about that is our growth interest and theirs are just super, super aligned, and the things that they wanna invest in or the things we wanna invest in, building out more products, building out more channels, you know, understanding how we, you know, can grow our brand. All things that are, that are really big parts of our next phase.

[00:02:08] John: And so I fully expect to be owned by Vista for, you know, many, many more years. They have a long track record of buying and holding and growing companies, and I think that's a really, we went from an A-list investor to an A-list investor and, and I think from an Acumatica perspective, that's great.

[00:02:24] John: Nothing about this is about change or cost cutting. It's all about continuing to shepherd and foster and enable the growth that we've experienced so far and just continuing that path. And so for us it was kind of an ideal situation.

[00:02:38] David: That's awesome. Awesome. I recently read an article that you wrote that was published in GeekWire, that talked about the secret sauce behind our company's growth. And, and you made it sound so easy, but I know it's not that easy. Right, John. The opening paragraph says, make the software easy to use.

[00:02:54] David: "Find the key partners to drive sales and learn from a community of users that help improve your product." Super, super profound. Would you like to maybe expand on that just, just, just a little bit?

[00:03:04] John: Well, of course. You know, I think that that formula sounds very simple, as you say, David, right. It sounds like why doesn't everybody do that, et cetera, et cetera. Well, there's lots of reasons not everybody does that. You know, one big reason is it's very hard to produce a product that resonates with that much of the market. And, and it's one that we have. We only have one product. We have one, effectively one code stack, one set of, you know, tools we write, you name it, we're not releasing nine different things. We release Acumatica twice a year. Right. And to do that in a way that speaks to all of our users across industry you know, whether it's a financial person or a person in manufacturing or whatever it is is incredibly difficult.

[00:03:41] John: And so, like, you know, strong, strong kudos to the team that has built that over many years. Folks like Ollie and Mike, et cetera, like they've made an amazing contribution to the industry with the product. So anything I'd say is then how do you think about your market plan?

[00:03:55] John: You know, we, we, we know we're still a small company. We can't reach tens of thousands of customers alone. We needed expertise, we needed presence and, and specialization in these industries and very, very clearly the way for us to do that was a channel. And you know, our channel for us has been the lifeblood of the company. It's been the way we grew the company from zero to where we are now. And that, and, you know, that will never change as long as I'm, you know, here at the company. Right. And that's a big, and that's what Vista wants as well. So I, I fully expect our channel to keep growing and, you know, we'll add to it and we'll, we'll get, you know, our small partners will get bigger and we'll be bringing on more partners in more industries and more places around the world.

[00:04:36] John: But for us, that'll always be the core of our business. And, you know, they bring so much expertise. So much knowledge, they, they, they can reach a, a, a set of customers that we would, we would struggle to reach with our small team. And that's a huge part of it. And then the community part, you know, we, we, we will talk about this, I'm sure the course of this discussion, but the community part around how we think we are part of a bigger thing, an ecosystem of users, builders, developers, you name it. Every company wants that. Every company wants to have a community that, that, that is basically fighting for them, fighting with them. We are the small minority of that community. I did a community keynote last week. It showed that Acumatic employees were 2% of the people participating in that community. A little thin blue slice, I think it was, or maybe it was purple. But that, I love that. Right, because what it means is the people that are really engaged, the ones that are driving content and awareness and word of mouth and, you know, use cases and examples and sample code. It's way beyond anything we could accomplish ourselves. And that is a formula for success. When customers want to work with us and they want to build on our platform and they want to share that with other users, there's no competitive zone there. It's about everybody contributing and makes the community better. And I think that formula is incredibly hard to replicate.

[00:05:57] John: And again, all kudos to people who built that over the last 15 years. I only inherited it three and a half years ago. And so it's, we've done a lot to help, but it's certainly not a formula that I created. I inherited it and have just helped it. That is a great way for us to say that, that is a magic secret sauce.

[00:06:13] John: It's super hard to replicate 'cause other companies that want to compete in our space can't do all those things the way we have. It's taken us decades to build. So that gives us a great chance to keep building it, right? It, it, it's a moat around our, around our position that we can continue to kind of foster, grow and bring more people in. And you know, I, I could not be more excited about that.

[00:06:34] David: Yeah. No, that is super exciting, right? I mean, nothing's more powerful than your ecosystem promoting Acumatica out there, right? That, that's, that's priceless from a marketing perspective. Good stuff. I, I'd love to focus a little bit more on our, on our customers, right? And such an important component of our ecosystem, right? But from the very beginning, Acumatica has always been focused on the needs of small and medium-sized businesses. Why is it so important that we keep a pulse on the SMB market and what makes now the right time for them to modernize their systems, John?

[00:07:05] John: Yeah, very good. I think, you know, the first thing I'd, I'd comment on that is because we know clearly what our customer target is, we can build for that target, right? We don't have to be assessing the needs of vastly different sizes of companies and vastly different, you know, types of industries. Like we can say no, our SMB customer, we can really define carefully what it is that they want. And we work with a, I think probably an underrepresented in the technology space set of companies like that. Like that's not, if you listen to big tech players or big SaaS players, they're often selling to very giant enterprises. And that's, you know, that's not our zone.

[00:07:39] John: Like we, that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to sell to a customer. We can define those customers have very strong needs, right? They want an end-to-end system. They want one thing that they can run their whole business on. They want us to do that. It doesn't have to be our code. It could be third-party code that integrates with us, but that gives us a very clear target to build for which is important.

[00:07:59] John: Okay. What I find with that customer set is that because they're kind of underrepresented in the tech environment, there's still tens of thousands of companies that meet that definition that have not flipped to a modern cloud system. And, and so, and, and you know, every year. Three, four, 5% of them realize that it's time.

[00:08:17] John: I always wonder what's holding back the rest? You know, why, why aren't the rest moving? And, you know, it's 60, 70% of the market and still are beginning to think about that. And they, they all intend to, right? They all intend to think that they're gonna head to modern technology, but the moments that cause 'em to change are so wildly different.

[00:08:34] John: It could be a transfer of ownership. It could be new leadership in finance. It could be, you know, some problem that they had or some issue they're trying to solve. It could be financial challenges where they're realizing they need to get smarter about how they manage their money. And all of those things together lead to, you know, a wave of transition.

[00:08:53] John: But it's not one thing. It's many, many, many things. And so every customer I talk to and I talk to, you know, dozens of customers a year. They all had their own unique reason. You know, we really decided we needed this one particular feature, or we really decided that, you know, after years of waiting to close our books, we needed to, we needed to find a faster way.

[00:09:11] John: Like y'all had a reason. Right? And with Acumatica, the great news is we can satisfy those reasons. There. There isn't, there isn't one thing I think that we can't do for that kind of company when they're ready for it. If they want a modern cloud platform and to work on a browser and to work on a phone, we have that.

[00:09:26] John: If they want to think about an end-to-end system for their manufacturing company or distribution company, we have that. If they want to think about you know, better multi-entity accounting 'cause they're coming outta something like QuickBooks. We have that. And so those customers find our end-to-end platform very much one that suits their needs.

[00:09:44] John: And their needs are so wildly different that it's again, amazing that we can pattern all that together. But we do. And so I think for us that the, the next 10 years are gonna be really exciting as we continue to find more and more ways to work with that customer set. And again, we can be laser focused on it.

[00:09:59] John: We're not distracted. Our channel helps us there and here we go. Right? And that's, that's what I find exciting about that opportunity and that customer target.

[00:10:07] David: Yeah. Yeah. And what's amazing about that customer target is that, from an economic perspective, how much of the economy, you know, in terms of, of how many employees are employed by small and medium-sized businesses, right? It's almost half of what's out there, so.

[00:10:23] John: And I find they don't swing always with the same economic trends. You know, we find, you know, big enterprises have been laying people off, well, mid-market companies been adding employment faster. You know, tariffs influence them different ways. There's all kinds of things where it isn't what's even talked about often in the news, they're talking about consumer spending or enterprises, the mid-market often gets missed.

[00:10:41] John: So I love having a pulse on that segment. In a way that I think is unique and, and we can again, be very targeted and focused in what we do.

[00:10:49] David: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome, awesome. Cool. You know, you mentioned earlier too, John, you spent a lot of time with customers, right? And I, I remember when I sat down with you when I was first hired, you said, make sure you spend time with customers, make sure you spend time with partners. Right. What are you hearing most about their business needs today and how does Acumatica really fit into those conversations?

[00:11:08] John: It's many things. So again, if it was one thing, it'd be a lot easier because it's many, many things. It really depends on the customer's situation, time, you name it. Overwhelmingly though, right? If you, if you speak to our partner group, which is, we know we connect our partners all the time 'cause that's our, effectively how we go to market and they do implementations and service and support.

[00:11:27] John: It's very easy to talk to partners at Acumatica. It's a little harder to get to the customer side because you have to go through a partner often to find that customer. And the customers are in interesting places. They are still, you know, kind of watching the economy carefully. They're thinking carefully about kind of what the next five years will bring.

[00:11:45] John: They're thinking about their own growth and expansion strategies, but, but they're also still overwhelmingly positive. They see so much opportunity in front of them. The companies that are interested in Acumatica, the ones that are working with us, they're growth businesses many times, almost all, in almost every case, they're thinking about how they're gonna get bigger or how they want to transfer, you know, their ownership to the next generation of their family or whatever it happens to be.

[00:12:09] John: And you, I, I sense overwhelmingly enthusiasm. I sense overwhelmingly positivity. I sense overwhelmingly, you know, encouragement. And, and again, it's, it's lifting all boats. It's not, I'm gonna go win or this person, it's like we as a, as a group, will grow. The great benefit of working with these mid-market customers is five manufacturers, I talk to all five of 'em in the same room. None of 'em are competing with each other. They love sharing their ideas. They love knowing that you know, what worked for them might work for them, and whether that's inventory management or supply chains or materials or whatever it is, like there's so much opportunity for folks to learn from each other.

[00:12:48] John: I think it's much harder, when you're selling to enterprises, 'cause they, they, it's a much more competitive zone and I love that. And so I think that that kind of community lifting all boats is not something that you get in most software businesses. And it's one of the things I like about, and again, that creates that kind of positive attitude.

[00:13:04] David: It sure does. Right. And I think nothing is, is, is more, you know, our whole summit, right? The whole conference that we...

[00:13:10] John: Great example.

[00:13:11] David: That's an example of our customers coming together and sharing different thoughts and working and playing off of each other. It's, it's super powerful.

[00:13:20] John: The summit for us is, you know, it's the, it's, it's a celebration of the year we finished. It's where we're headed, right? All the things we wanna go do. But overwhelmingly what I find it is, is like a place for people to reflect and help each other and know how, you know, oh, this, this is, here's this exciting thing that you might not know about.

[00:13:35] John: I, I love sending any potential customer to summit. Because they will find people to talk to who encourage them to go use Acumatica. And it doesn't matter. I don't have to introduce them. I don't, I don't have to curate those experiences. They happen organically there and I love that.

[00:13:48] David: Totally. I, I worked for a company where they didn't want any of the prospects at the, at the user conference because they didn't want to, to expose the...

[00:13:55] John: I want, I want 'em all, I want thousands of prospects at our conferences.

[00:13:57] David: Exactly. Exactly. Love it, love it.

[00:14:00] John: Right.

[00:14:01] David: So along the lines of community and customers and all that, I want to turn to Acumatica's rallying cry, which is Building the Future of Business Together.

[00:14:08] David: Right. It really captures the importance of community and the values that we share. The executive team recently communicated values to, to the rest of the organization. I wanna give you an opportunity to talk about them and why they're important to Acumatica.

[00:14:21] John: Good. Well, the rallying cry, you know, we, we did that a couple years ago and what, what, what made me enthusiastic about that? It was something that came from one of our leaders who said, you know, we need a, we need a new way of kind of explaining our role, you know, a new way of explaining what we believe in.

[00:14:36] John: I love that rallying cry. You, it's in our advertising. It's on our website. You see, it's everywhere. We certainly talk about it at Summit and, and you know, the words are very carefully chosen. You know, like we are builders, right? We're all about the future, right? We we're, we're a futureproof platform. We're all about business, right?

[00:14:50] John: And we're all about it together, together as that ecosystem, that community. And so we, we took a look at that again this year and said, you know what? We are completely committed to that rallying cry. It really frames who we are. It frames how we view the market. It, it frames our role. And, and I love that.

[00:15:05] John: And then, but we, we hadn't done in a few years was talk to employees about our values, like what we value as a team, what we wanted to hire for and reward people on and all, you know, what we thought we wanted our sort of image to be to some extent. And so we went through a process of rethinking that and we kept, we kept some things the same, but changed some things.

[00:15:22] John: But it starts with being customer first. Right. And I think that it's very easy, as businesses get bigger, to lose sight of that. I want the customer voice to always be the deciding factor. Okay. And then, and then it gets into all kinds of other things around how we solve those problems for customers being nimble, you know, being pragmatic and kind of real-world focused.

[00:15:39] John: Thinking about how we go, like all those ways that I think customer first answers will come out and being results-oriented and accountable and all like, but that's our values. And so that'll all become public over time. More targeted at the employees and maybe our partners than anything else.

[00:15:55] John: But it should always reflect into that rallying cry. The rallying cry that says, this is why we exist. This is how we want to go to market. This is how we, the role we wanna play in the ecosystem. How do we expect people at the company to, to play in that? And that's what those values are all about. And so we, we, you know, that's being rolled out right now internally.

[00:16:12] John: The voice of the customer should always tell you the right answer and they're right. Right? And so it's great to remind people of that and refresh them every few years.

[00:16:22] David: I, I gotta tell you, when, when you were delivering that in our company-wide meeting, values and all that, you know, we had a chat on amongst the product marketing team on, on the side. And people were like, sharing hearts and somebody said, that's why I love working for this company. So it's, it resonated with the employees, John.

[00:16:37] John: That was not a light project. We took a lot of care and thoughtfully, we multiple lots of revisions, lots of drafts and 'cause it's all about your own voice too, right? How you would say those things. So, yeah. Thank you.

[00:16:48] David: Yeah, for sure, for sure. I, I wanna focus a little bit on the customer Bill of Rights because that's pretty unique, right? So how does that make Acumatica different in the industry?

[00:16:57] John: Yeah. Customer Bill of Rights something's been around for a long time. We did do a, a modernization of it, I think about three years ago, or some of the things we seem kind of outdated or, or, or, or no longer didn't make as much sense in the current business, but the Bill of Rights exists to, again, a little bit like the rallying cry, to, to, to explain to a customer how we want them to perceive us. We want things like, you know, clean security and, you know, no simple fees. And we want things like, you know, fair pricing. We want, like, it's, it's a, it's sort of a set of a set of promises to make to the customer. Like, this is a, this is who we want to be, hold us to this.

[00:17:35] David: Right.

[00:17:36] John: Free online training. You know, you can, you can move your data and you own your data if you want to. You can deploy it how you want. All, all those kinds of things. We, we took a look at each one and decided that each one of them either needed revision or was still valid or we wanted to clarify it. But I love showing that to customers 'cause they look at that and they think, I've never seen a software company do this before.

[00:17:55] John: Certainly not in our industry and I don't, I don't like talking about competitors, but certainly our competitors don't follow a lot of those things in our Bill of Rights. And so we're very committed to it. It's something that we will continue to promote and enhance and, and you know, again, we'll, it'll, we'll clarify it every few years but I think it shows customers and partners, but shows customers our commitment is to them.

[00:18:20] John: It's not, our commitment isn't to you know, ourselves. Our commitment isn't into some technical idea that sits in the ether, like our commitment is to them, and that's what the Bill of Rights is all about.

[00:18:30] David: Yeah, I know when I was, you know, doing my due diligence before I came to work for Acumatica, I was, was very, very impressed by it. And all of my career has been in the technology space. I've never seen anything like it. So...

[00:18:41] John: No, and neither had I. Like I was very impressed by that when I got here. Yeah, totally agree.

[00:18:45] David: Yeah. That's awesome. Awesome. So all that, you know, our rallying cry, our values, you know, this customer Bill of Rights, it's all about culture, right?

[00:18:52] David: And it helps shape the culture of, of, of Acumatica, and it's a huge differentiator. You know, why is culture so critical to our success and how does listening to customers shape it?

[00:19:03] John: I think it's very easy. It's all about the growth journey. It's very easy to have a strong culture amongst a few people. At a small company. It's very hard. To have that same culture carry over as companies get larger. As you know, we have, you know, thousands and thousands of customers, hundreds and hundreds of partners, hundreds and hundreds of ISVs.

[00:19:22] John: Like, it's very hard to sustain that. And so to me it becomes really important to put those words on paper to talk about them a lot, to show examples of success. That being, you know, the company awards that we do internally are all about the, you know, those values and, and, and the rallying cry, those kinds of things.

[00:19:39] John: You have to promote them more. You have to be louder about those kinds of things to make sure the culture survives. I, I, I'm constantly worried. One of my biggest challenges, I think as a, as a leader is, can I keep what's special about Acumatica together while we go through this aggressive wave of growth?

[00:19:57] John: And so, and it's not, but, but again, it's about who you hire. You know, from a leadership down, it's about how you communicate. It's about your actions. You know, are you, are you living up to the standards that you set for yourself in every way you possibly can? And there's always, there's always gonna be tough decisions.

[00:20:14] John: There's 51, 49 decisions that you have to make all the time. What guides those decisions? A lot of it is culture. So, you know, I think that for me is if we can continue to protect the culture that continues to make sure that Acumatica is very different than a lot of the other companies in the software space and not just in ERP.

[00:20:32] John: When I think about my biggest business challenges, that's it, right? Can I, can I keep what's great about us great, while we expand to, you know, work with many, many, many thousands more customers. That's a fun challenge.

[00:20:45] David: Love the culture here at Acumatica. It's, it's, it's super, super cool. So let's, let's talk a little bit about product now.

[00:20:51] David: So from like a product perspective how does Acumatica stand out and rise above all this noise out there, if you will, in the ERP market? Because there's a lot of players, right? How do we stand out above everyone else?

[00:21:03] John: I think there's a couple things. I mean, it's easy to talk about functionality. It's easy to talk about, like, you know, we have the best widget for X. I don't think that's always what it is. I think it's much more around usability. Right? It's much more how, how people can rapidly onboard into the product and rapidly see progress and time to value.

[00:21:19] John: That's a huge part of that. And we, we've done so much work on usability as a team you know, all the way back to the original founding of the company. But even now, we're revising that platform all the time with things like our modern UI. Usability is a huge component. I think our, our APIs. How you, how you configure, you know, the product is so unique.

[00:21:39] John: I think it's so much easier to do things you want to do in Acumatica versus other things. It's, it's, it's off the shelf is great. Okay. But, you know, I, I wanna make sure this internal system is hooked in correctly. I wanna make sure I'm getting data in the way I want it. And I think we, we create, you know, flexibility.

[00:21:58] John: Flexibility is, is also a problem. Like if we give too much flexibility, it means customers can do things that hamper performance in some cases. But, so finding the boundary between, you know, flexibility and which we really, really, really care about. And, and performance is hard, but we've done a very good job of that.

[00:22:16] John: And so customers that want to work with us find that balance. And partners like to promote it that way. So you can get into all the specific data, all and functionality. But I like those two things a lot. I like saying it's the most usable, you know, easy to kinda onboard platform. And it's also the one where.

[00:22:34] John: You know, if you have difficult needs, there's things you can do to make it work. Now, let's go beyond that for a second. I think that increasingly it's about data and AI plays an amazingly important role. And I think that and, and I think because of our status as the cloud ERP, because of our modern platform, because of the, again, thousands of customers that we manage in our cloud it it gives us the ability to do really customer first things with AI that others can't replicate.

[00:23:04] John: We've started a very interesting and exciting journey there. I think most of our mid-market SMB companies are still watching. Like, you know, I, if you're a, you know, a $20 million construction company, you don't have an AI strategy. You want to bet on software companies that are gonna do that.

[00:23:20] John: You want to know that you're getting help from your system and automation and assistance and whatever it happens to be. And so I think we have a really exciting chance to bring very pragmatic AI. To this set of thousands of customers in a way that makes them more productive. And, and that to me is very different.

[00:23:36] John: Like it's still in the formative stages. I can't tell you where the, what the end game is but I know that it's gonna be something that customers value greatly. And I we're already seeing the beginnings of that. Again, the release we just did, the release we did in, in back in January, same thing.

[00:23:52] John: And I think that, that for us is a very important, you know, we are, we're the, we're the backbone of these companies. We're their spine, right? We're their nervous system, however you wanna say it.

[00:24:00] David: Right, right.

[00:24:01] John: Better we can do to make sure the product works for them, is, is the only way we can continue to say that we have this amazing definable value.

[00:24:11] David: One of the comments that you made in statements you made in one of your articles was, you know that, that SMBs have all the same challenges. That these huge enterprises have, right? They just don't have the resources, whether it's people or financial resources to, to tackle those problems.

[00:24:26] David: Right? So that usability part becomes super, super important. And AI, they don't have time to go analyze AI systems and see how they, you know, and what I love about our strategy, it's like it's embedded. We use this term practical innovation for our customers, right? Pretty powerful stuff.

[00:24:41] John: And there'll be customers on the leading edge that will do things with our AI studio tools that are, that are interesting. But there'll be customers who want to watch and want, want us to recommend. And I think the system will do more and more work for them. And I think that's, I'm excited about that.

[00:24:55] David: Yeah, I am too. I'm too super cool. So as you look ahead what's most exciting about where Acumatica is going?

[00:25:03] John: Wow. That's a long list. I joke, but I mean it, Acumatica and all of our community and ecosystem have this chance to put a real mark down in the world of technology. We have a chance to be a generational company. We have a chance to be, you know, the next platform that everyone wants to evaluate.

[00:25:24] John: We have, we, we had this unbelievable, like the, the, the, the foundation's there, the product foundation's there, the channel foundation's there. The success of thousands of customers is there. And so, you know, I get excited about what we get excited about is how do we see that really come true over the next five or 10 years?

[00:25:41] John: And I, I, I use this phrase a lot, we're just getting started and it's, you've probably heard me say it a bunch of times. No matter what year it is, I still feel like we're just getting started. And I think there are very few places in the industry where you can say that kind of thing. And I, I think we can, we have the ability to take advantage of technology trends.

[00:26:00] John: As they emerge and evolve. We have the ability to, to really work on, you know, kind of customer perception and awareness of ourselves and our, and our channel partners and our ecosystem. And I think that's a really unique place to be. At, at a technology company as a leader, you name it.

[00:26:16] John: Can we protect the culture, right? And can we, can we make sure the product stays the, the same, you know, amazing level of usability? Can I, can we get, you know, customers onboarded 75, 80% faster?

[00:26:28] John: That's what I get excited about.

[00:26:30] David: Yeah, I do too. A lot. A lot of us do. Yeah.

[00:26:32] John: We have to figure out what options we take. Like us, there's so much we could tackle and we're still not, and you know, we're not an enormous company. We now have a great backer helping us think through those things. That, that to me is what's interesting is like, how are we gonna choose to, like, what are the steps that we take over the next five years?

[00:26:48] John: It'll be fun to watch.

[00:26:49] David: Yeah, I agree. Super, super exciting.

[00:26:51] David: Okay, so you ready for the, the lightning round, John?

[00:26:54] John: Round. Okay. I'm not even sure what this is. Let's go.

[00:26:56] David: Okay, let's do it. Okay. First question. Describe your leadership style in three words.

[00:27:02] John: It's positive, energetic and collaborative.

[00:27:05] David: Agree.

[00:27:06] John: Good.

[00:27:06] David: Yeah, no, yeah. Perfect. I, I witness it. I witness it. So second question. What tool or habit keeps you sharp as a leader?

[00:27:15] John: That I mentor on a lot, it's about figuring out ways of what, what, it's this phrase I use, what charges your batteries and what doesn't charge your batteries. So what drains energy? What adds energy? I think that every person has to find their own balance. If you get very thoughtful about that habit, you know, knowing there are things I wanna do, I, I need to do some customer visits, 'cause that's really gonna build up my energy.

[00:27:36] John: Every job, every, every, every vocation or vocation has parts you don't like. You gotta find a balance with, you know, with the parts that you really do. Like build from that you feed off of, and that's a habit I like to create with people.

[00:27:51] David: That's awesome. That's awesome. Love it. Love it. Okay. What book podcasts or thinker has shaped your approach to leadership?

[00:27:59] John: Wow. I, I, what's interesting is I don't read or listen to a lot of business books or podcasts. Right. I don't, it's not my style. I, I, you know, I went to business school, et cetera, et cetera. I read a lot of books, right? And I read a lot of books that are mostly history. Mostly nonfiction, all those kinds of things.

[00:28:15] John: So I'm not sure there's one. I'm not sure I have one thing that's really shaped my style. I think it's been much more kind of something that's built up over many years. I think I'm a very different leader now than I was in my twenties and thirties. And it's more just watching. I, I love reading about historical figures of decisions that they made and it helps me think, reflect on what decisions I'm making today.

[00:28:35] David: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:36] John: That's the best. I'm not sure. That's a great answer. That's the best.

[00:28:38] David: No, I think that's a perfect answer, and I think it plays right into that first question, which was about your leadership style, and you said...

[00:28:43] John: Yeah, I find...

[00:28:44] David: I imagine that you're always taking in all these sorts of different proof points to kind of evolve yourself as a leader. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's awesome.

[00:28:52] David: Okay. And the last one, which is the big one, John, you ready for this one?

[00:28:56] John: Oh, I don't know. Let's find out.

[00:28:58] David: Let's find out. Okay. What one bold prediction do you have for the future of ERP?

[00:29:06] John: Bold prediction. Wow. Okay. I, I, I think that we're eventually gonna get to a point where the system can do work for you, okay? And what I mean by that is so much of ERP today is still manual. It's still, you know, hand connecting bank feeds. It's still, you know, hand stitching invoices, writing paper checks.

[00:29:26] John: There's still so much there, and I think that we will eventually reach a point you could call it AI, you call it, whatever you wanna call it, where, where the system is effectively staffing your problem. And I, I, I'm really excited about that point. That's a few years away. And I, but I think that we'll be able to say to companies, we now are delivering not just a software tool to you.

[00:29:45] John: We're delivering effectively a, a team to you. And I think that's really cool.

[00:29:49] David: Yeah. No, I do, I do too. I, I, and I love that, right? Because, and, and it's not about like. Eliminating. Well, it is about eliminating cost, but not people, but allowing people to focus on what's more strategic, Totally. Totally. Cool. Well, Yeah. This, this has been awesome. Thank you so much.

[00:30:04] John: We'll talk to you soon.

[00:30:06] David: John, thanks so much for joining us on the very first Acumatica ERP podcast. Thank you to our listeners. We hope you enjoyed hearing John's perspective on where Acumatica stands today, the values that guide our community, and how we're helping customers build the future of business together.

[00:30:20] David: Be sure to subscribe to the Acumatica ERP podcast so you don't miss any upcoming episodes. And be sure to visit acumatica.com frequently for resources, product insights, updates, and more. Thank you and have a nice day.