Technology Intelligence: What Business Owners Need To Know

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit Podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms, let’s get started.

Heather Bennett  0:22

Hello. I’m Heather Bennett, your host for Growth + Exit pot, the podcast featuring middle market owners and experts talking about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Past guests have include Doug Tatum, founder of Tatum Financial, Dan Lawrence, the co founder and CEO of OBM Inc., and Allison Cummins of Blue Outcomes. This episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a team of seasoned C suite executives who help CEOs of privately held companies grow de risk and exit their business successfully. Go to newportllc.com for our website, or find us on LinkedIn to learn more and to contact us. Before introducing today’s guest, I’m very excited to be talking to I want to give a huge thank you to Megan Robinson of E Leadership, please go check her out on LinkedIn as well. She specializes in coaching executives and has so much to offer for the C suite and business owners. Today’s guest, Jody Jankovsky is the Founder and Managing Member of Blackline Consulting. He has considerable experience in addressing his client’s needs throughout his 30 plus years experience in the IT industry. Mr. Jankovsky holds a BS in computer science with an emphasis on accounting from the Illinois State University, and has continued his professional education through numerous technical and business focused classes and organization. He is author, and this is very exciting, of the 2025 released book, Technology Intelligence, or TQ. Technology Intelligence is the Business Leaders Guide to thriving in the intelligent age. Jody, welcome to the show. I am so grateful you’re here.

Jody Jankovsky  2:18

Well. Thank you very much, Heather, I am totally pumped to be here talking with you about something that has been my life’s work. So it’s always great to be able to share those experiences. And I hope there’s a lot of value that you can get in anybody who’s watching this today. So super, super excited.

Heather Bennett  2:39

So let me ask you, first, of course, black line, so being a founder and founding it a few decades ago, what? What was the decision to go down that route?

Jody Jankovsky  2:52

Well, I had been working in corporate America for a few years. I had started my own business when I was in college, working with small companies, and solving technology problems for the let’s just call it the main street. Then I worked for about five years in corporate and what I saw was that the disciplines, the the standards, the strategies of technology use in the small business was not at the same level that the big companies were able to provide. They had the people, they had the they had the resources to invest in into their technologies. And I really believe there’s a need for a professional approach to technology for the small, mid sized company, like there was a vacuum of skills and professionalism. And I loved working with small companies. I liked. I loved working shoulder to shoulder with other business leaders and helping them take technology and get real outcomes. And I remember sitting in my house, I just had gotten married. You know, my lucky wife, as soon as we get married, within six months, I’m like, I’m starting my own business. I’m tired of what I’m seeing. I’m going to I’m going to jump out into the world. And it’s like, what are you going to do? And then, so it was really taking a leap of faith, but I figured, and actually it’s kind of part of a mantra, is I did not want to live my life with any regrets. I had been read that, and I talked to somebody early on, and one of the advice, piece of advice they gave me was, live a life without regrets, and because you don’t want to get towards the end of your your life. And there’s something about regret that is more damaging and hurtful to you than any almost anything else you can you can recover from so many things, but regret of not taking action about something as important as your life’s work, I felt the need to do that, so I took a leap and decided to start. A business, excellent.

Heather Bennett  5:02

So what were those first, we’ll say couple of years. Like, because I always find that’s the most one most interesting points, when it’s make it or break it, you’re trying to get this off the ground. What? What do you think helped you get through those first like, we’ll say two to five years.

Jody Jankovsky  5:20

Well, the first couple of years were were pretty fun and exciting, because I was an engineer. I am an engineer by trade. I computer scientist. So I came into the market with a lot of deep I’ve been programming and in the computer science field. By the time I was in my my mid 20s, I’ve been, I’ve been already a decade of experience, which is very unusual. I’m very grateful. I was very grateful and and honored to be in a situation where I had that much depth so I was able to really produce a lot of outcomes for businesses. And I was really exciting building, building big systems, building interesting systems to solve problems. So early on it was, it was great. Where the rub started was going from being myself and building and maybe bringing in a subcontractor or two to help with projects, it was that I’m going to go from a project to a company. So projects is really kind of like a lifestyle business. I’m making good money. I work when I you know, not when I work when I want, but I have flexibility of my schedule because I’m in control of that. Those are all the great tenants, right, of being an entrepreneur, right? But growing and actually creating a company that’s a whole different ball game, right? So that’s adding people, that’s adding process, that’s adding systems, that’s that’s okay, that is where it started to get a little bit challenging. That would be, like, within by the time I got to three years, I’m like, I don’t want to just do project work and and fighting for the next project that’s like, feast or famine. I wanted to build

Heather Bennett  7:02

a company. What were the indicators that let you know this needed to be more than a one or two person show, like, what was the Was there something going on the marketplace? Was there a trend you were seeing were were your clients asking what? What was the point that you said, Okay, I this needs to be a little bit bigger than just me.

Jody Jankovsky  7:23

I think it was the the emotional effect of having the ups and downs of my own income number one. And then, if you just take a first principles approach to it, it’s like, okay, that I get into this world to just have a a better like a job that had more flexibility to it, right? Or did I actually really want to build a company, which means that you are bringing other people along for the ride, and you are going to take the ideas, the best practices, the vision that I had for how technology, for lack of better term, ought to be implemented, and then have that be spread through multiple people, and then have that grow, and have that message grow well now that shifted the mindset from being an engineer and solving a problem technically to now I have to look at solving this challenge, like with multiple people, and then start to become a real business person. That was that. That was the kind of Genesis, I guess, of it was. And I read a book The E-Myth. If you’ve ever heard of The E-Myth, I can’t remember who the author happens to be, and some of

Heather Bennett  8:40

these things up and put it in the show notes. Yeah. So The E-Myth was

Jody Jankovsky  8:43

a great book. I read that very early on, and it as in the in the title, like this is the entrepreneurial myth, if you really want to grow a business, there’s there’s other aspects of it, which is the most challenging aspect of growing a business, if I can just jump right into that, just a couple of things real quick on that, which is, you have to become, this is what I found. You have to become an expert at every major function in a running organization in order to and I found that because if I didn’t have that, that expertise, I want to call be expert level understanding, name it, insurance, law, accounting, finance, operations, human resources, the kind of The list kind of goes almost on and on. There probably 12 disciplines you have to at least right, like with I want to call expert level knowledge, meaning, not only can you can you understand the concepts that go along with that function, you wonder you need to know those, not to do it yourself, but under the proper. Hold people accountable, right? Either you’re outsourcing it or you’re in sourcing. It doesn’t really matter. Lesson learned, there’s a decade of pain and suffering wrapped up in The E-Myth is delegate. Part of it is you need to delegate. Okay, you can’t grow a business without delegation. Well, the problem with that is you can’t, you can’t irresponsibly delegate. It says, Oh, I’m just going to throw that over to, you know, so and so, and they’re going to take care of it. That is what the mindset was. Oh, I hire somebody who says that they know about a general manager who’s going to help with operational controls and putting disciplines in and accountability to the team. I’m going to hire somebody to do that because I didn’t know how to do it. Well, the problem is now I’ve got somebody I can’t hold accountable, and they can go do just about whatever and not find out until later, when my business is almost almost bankrupt. So that is part of the challenge, I guess, of growing one of the challenges is that I’m an engineer. I didn’t have that training. And I think so many organizations, or so many people, I should say, or leaders or founders will go into it, and I guess, just be prepared for the fact that it’s it’s expanding your current knowledge of what, whatever that is, the domain that they’re experts in, or why they want to do this. It’s like, you’ve got to take that and you’ve got to add domains you don’t give a crap about, and now you’ve got to become an expert in, I didn’t even, I didn’t even cover sales and marketing. Holy shit, to do the biggest ones in sales and marketing. And I’m like, I had to go from being an engineer to being a sales and a marketer like, talk about a mindset shift. Holy moly. So anyway,

Heather Bennett  11:51

I love that you bring that up. I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for about 25 years, and I have a series of questions I’ve added to over the years. And so many of those questions when I first meet them are literally just going through a list of, let’s find out what you don’t know and what you haven’t thought of and what else can affect this really wonderful business you’re building. And and it is, it is very interesting, things like insurance, like marketing, things that, if they have an expertise in what they’re doing, which is why they’re creating this company they just don’t know about. And the great thing is, to your point, is that you have the option to delegate, and you have the opportunity to learn something new, because, you know, we should all be lifelong learners, but learn enough that you can make a good decision about it. So you have really touched on one of the tenants that I think is most important for entrepreneurs starting up. And yeah, we’ll make sure we add The E-Myth to to the show notes. That’s a great reference.

Jody Jankovsky  12:49

Okay, yeah, I was gonna say, when you said that, what came to mind is something that exists across the ecosystem of an organization for leaders. I’m just, I’m going to put most business leaders are going to be in this category, maybe even all is that you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s that’s called unconscious incompetence. Okay, there and there’s, there’s a, there’s a hierarchy of of competence levels, and at the bottom of it is unconscious incompetence, which means you don’t know what you don’t know. And if you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re, you’re, you’re thrown at the whims of of what’s going to happen around you, unless you begin to be move up the ladder of competency, which is now become consciously incompetent, which is, no, I don’t know about sales. Okay? I can feel it when I get into sales meetings. I’m not doing the right things. I’m not getting the outcomes results. I’ve got to change something. Well, if you’re consciously incompetent, as opposed to, I just don’t know what I’m going to do about sales now, you’re going to start moving up the ladder to conscious competence, which is, I’m now going to learn about it, I’m going to dive in, I’m going to read books, I’m going to talk to people, I’m going to practice, I’m going to get in the gym of sales, and I’m going to do my reps. And if there was another tie, you know, back to, like, this whole concept of understanding and running a business, it would be picking there’s, it’s a natural there’s brain science on this level of unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and then unconscious competence. That’s, that’s guru level. You just do it naturally, like, once it becomes ingrained, you’re going to do it naturally. I’ve seen that in myself, and I’ve seen that in almost every other business leader that’s out there, especially in the concept of technology, which is part of the reason I write, wrote the book on TQ our technology intelligence was because the 90 to 90. 5% of the business leaders that I’ve worked with over 45 years are are unconsciously incompetent, or they’re consciously incompetent. They 90 to 95% of them are in that group. And I wrote a book to say, let me help you become that you don’t have to become a technologist. Just understand this world, just like you start to understand the world of sales and you understand the world of marketing, you understand what the different levers are. You don’t have to become a pro copywriter, right? You have to become a graphic designer, right? It’s the same thing. It’s the same you don’t have to become a cutthroat outside sales Hunter, right? We have to understand what are the components of that? So you can hire somebody who is maybe not cutthroat, but you kind of get my drift, right? Like, yeah, the hunter as opposed to the farmer, right? Like, you understand, oh, I had to figure out, guess what? There’s a difference between outside sales and inside sales, and there’s different qualifications, there’s different skill sets. There’s different men mindset. There’s different way they approach the world. Like that. Took me years to understand just that. Like, you talked to a sales leader, you talked to a VP of sales, and be like, Duh. Like, that’s just how sales operates, right? I was like, you know, banging my head up against the wall, of like, what do these things mean? And when you read books, and that’s just again, you got to just do the reps. You got to talk to people. What does this mean? Got to be humble.

Heather Bennett  16:28

It’s good. It’s good. I one of the best investments I made in my career was a few years back, getting into a sales coaching group where I was accountable and learning with other small to mid size, leaders, how to grow a business through sales and and, like you said, it felt like there was homework. We were practicing. There was a lot of reps, but that is what it takes to become competent with that particular skill set. Okay? So it sounds like it was just, you know, all roses and smooth sailing for the rest of the time, right? Was there any point where you were like, maybe this isn’t what I’m supposed

Jody Jankovsky  17:06

to be doing? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, I, I would imagine that the founders are that are watching this, or potential founders, the numbers are pretty compelling that whatever 80% 90% of businesses fail in the first year, within the next five years, 95 to 99% of them are gone. And if you get past that, you get to 10 years, 20 years it you know, the number of companies that survive are very, very, very, very small. And I, I I wouldn’t attribute that in in my world to like, I’ve somehow cracked some code and I got some superior intelligence or something, you know, I remember there was two. There was two. The two main components were, one was a project that I had been working on the it was being run by one, at the time, one of the big six accounting firms, and I was being brought in to help, and I was pointing out that this project is going to fail. I’m just like, this is just not and for lots of good reasons, it wasn’t just, you know, techno arrogance of like, hey, it should be done a different way. I’m like, there’s some serious problems here. And by raising my hand and by putting my neck out there, it created a situation where it’s like, you know, we’re making millions over here, and we don’t want this little sticky wheel, you know, doing this thing. So, you know, we’re just going to kind of phase you out. And it was like sitting in my basement, I remember, on a chair, and I was like, I just lost one of my biggest customers because I thought I was doing what I thought was right, was raising the alarm and and I just wanted a better outcome for my client. And I’m like, is that how this world works? Like, how am I going to exist in a world where I want to do the right thing or or be better, be different, be distinctive, look for the better outcome, and but yet now have this, like, awful thing occur. I’m like, What do I do? This is probably four years in, and I’m like, Well, I’m not going to quit, and I’m going to I’m going to lean into my values. Maybe it was the way I went about it. Maybe it was I was a little too bold. Maybe I was a little bit too black and white about it. Maybe I needed to to be a little bit more diplomatic. And so I just, I went in, and I’m like, What do I’m not going to point at them. I’m going to point at me and go, What can I do different? What was it that I did? And I analyzed that, and I came back with a fresh sense of, this is, this is something I can, I can battle through. And then the second time was the, what do you call it? The you. It was the financial crisis, 2008 oh yeah. And we had built up a sizable organization. I mean, sizable for me at the time. We were 17, almost 20 people at the time, and we had, we were heavy on the mortgage and finance and financial services and tangential to the mortgage and financial business. We had a lot of customers in that, in that sphere, and when that came collapsing down, I went from almost 20 down to seven, and it was like this, like and it was, it was built up through the typical word of mouth networking groups, my own, you know, my own personal network. And, you know, kind of can doing all the dots that you have to do as a founder, you got a rainmaker, and all of a sudden that was just gone, like, literally gone overnight. That was like, I don’t I started. I started getting my resume together. I started talking to placement firms. I thought, this is on its way. I started looking at, can I sell? Who can I sell to the remaining I mean, I was pretty like, like, I’m, I think I’m, this might be it for me. And I just persevered through it. I mean, there was a lot of like, not wanting to quit and cracking the code and, okay, well, what, what put me here? What was my what was the challenge? Oh, guess what? I had this. I had this concentration of customers that were industry, you know, vertical like that created a whole lot of risk. Well, a CEO of any company is going to be assessing that risk continually. Is there a concentration to customers? Is there a concentration vertical? What happens if you know, you got to do a SWOT analysis on that vertical, or do I have one customer that occupies 20% of my revenue, or copy occupies 40% of my revenue, like that, you’d have to just deal with that like that. That’s what was learned. Or I could have just been like, I’m out, like, I’m out. This is too hard or whatever, and that just isn’t part of my fabric. And I just wanted to understand and fix it. And so we did. So now we’re, yeah, industry agnostic, and we’re, we’re very broad in our industries, for for that exact reason, because I’ve went through multiple cycles, and when you have somebody hit hard in those cycles, you’re, you know, it’s going to damage you. So we had to figure that out.

Heather Bennett  22:40

It’s so interesting. I was at a marketing networking event last night, and we were talking about the risks of having such a high percentage of your income for revenue for your company coming from a single group or a single company, and how that de risking by by spreading where your client base is, is so incredibly valuable, especially when you don’t know when that next crisis is going to happen. So I’m glad you brought that up. That’s a good awareness, and it it’s hard to learn that when you’re trying to quickly grow your business. So that’s a great ad.

Jody Jankovsky  23:22

Yeah, so you know this is,

Heather Bennett  23:26

this has been so helpful so far, but I really want to talk about your book, because I know that it is, it’s a passion for you to bring this information to people and and really, really exciting, I think, at the time point that we’re in now with AI, the difference, you know, the tech stacks are changing faster and more rapidly. Companies are looking for solutions in very, very different ways, I think, than they were before, from technology. So why the book? Why now? And who are you trying to help with this book?

Jody Jankovsky  24:05

Well, uh, great question. And big picture, it’s 45 years of what I understand, what I’ve understood, what I’ve witnessed, what I have experienced myself personally, what the businesses I’ve worked with, hundreds of companies and 1000s of business leaders over the past 45 years, and there is a common theme that I found, and I and I’ve been very privileged to have that perspective. I started my career with my dad in his in our garage at 12 when he started a software company. So in the late 70s, you couldn’t buy a computer. You had to assemble them, right? And then you had to build your own software, which is what we did. And I was able to see the genesis of our age that we’re in today, from building and programming computers for single. Uh, or for single people, if you will, up to what you see today. This, this interconnected, interdependent cloud technologies that are exponential processing power and applications that can do all kinds of things for the business. And then seeing that evolution occur, there’s been some common threads through all of it. The technology might change. But what I’ve seen as a common thread, or a common challenge, is, number one is, I kind of boiled it down, is that the current state of it is broken. That might sound bold, it’s broken. No, it does not serve businesses as it ought to, as it could be, because there is a a well, I call it the technology industrial complex. There is a casino of technology and technologists which has evolved over those past 45 years, which which now creates for the business leader of any size organization, it creates dependence, it creates confusion. There is everything from incompetence to malice inside of that complex that is create, and it’s affecting the way in which technology can be deployed, in in value creation, inside the modern organization, inside the modern business. So this, there’s a force out there. And so part of this book is a expose it. What are the what are the characteristics of the tick? How does it operate? What are the warning signs? How do you see? How it affects you? What are the gaps that have been seen? So then I then I’ve identified that there’s gaps. There’s there’s a leader. I call it leader competency gap. There’s, there’s Innovation Council gap, meaning, where are you getting your counsel? Because we all have to have we go to an attorney, we go to a lawyer, we even go to our our mechanic. We get counsel on you understand this thing, right? You want whatever that domain is, okay? And you go, we have to trust them. As business owners, we have to trust them. We have to, we have, we rely upon them. Now in all, all kinds of other industries, though, that trust is built through brands. It’s built through history and experience and qualifications and and certifications, the you know, the CPAs lawyers have got the bar engineers have got professional engineering. There’s all these certification which is intended to do that. We don’t have that in it. There might be technical, tech, let’s call it technology focused ones, but there isn’t, there isn’t the the way in which technologies are deployed, from the business perspective, there isn’t a framework for that. And I believe what’s come from that ultimately, is there’s a language barrier. So you have these gaps, right? We’ve got gaps. The organizations have got gaps in terms of how they deploy technology. There’s it’s very complicated. It very interconnected, but my book is intended to distill it and break it down so that the business person can understand where it’s like that unconscious, unconscious incompetence kind of level. Let’s get you out of that. Let’s get you even beyond conscious incompetence. Let’s get you into conscious competence. Let’s, let’s create some competency so that you become a more tech enabled leader. You are empowered. You’re making decisions based upon real frameworks and and let’s call it, it’s a methodology. You’re making decisions based upon it, as opposed to blind trust, as opposed to relying upon people, software companies, manufacturers that are part of the tick, that are just, that are trying to, just trying to sell you something, that are just looking to get their quota filled. They’re just, they’re not solution oriented. They are sales oriented. It’s, there’s so many facets that I can cover right now. But really what it comes down to is, there’s, there’s four components to technology, intelligence, to our mindset, focused on the leader, and two, our impact focused on the organization. It starts with us. It starts with the leader, all these things that we’ve been talking about in terms of running a business. Yeah, it just take the it. You know, the tech stack or the silo is the same concept. You have to we have to learn. We got to get in the gym, man. You got to do the reps. Understand this. World you gotta you gotta take the courses. You gotta learn what it does technology mean? How can you innovate? What does innovation mean? Are there ways in which we can provide structure and methods to give clarity, to give empowerment, and that’s really what I wrote this book about is to create a framework and a language. Now we can have some language so that technologists and business leaders are on different islands of of this one topic. So it’s been really exciting process to go through. It’s like it’s taken me almost a year to essentially deconstruct these ideas that I use in my business, but also taking it to the I added these components of mindset to the leader, because it starts with it starts with them, like, like you have This world around you in a way that creates those skill sets, to be a empowered, intelligent in the intelligent age, to be a leader who can really drive the outcomes that I’m telling you this, this age we’re moving into calling it the Intelligent Yeah, is, it’s, it’s it’s the Information Age is where we’ve been that’s focusing on the distribution, management, creation of information, the intelligent age. Now it’s a whole nother Ball, ball game of taking these AI tools, these, this automation, the the ability to take and solve things digitally in both the physical world of atoms and also in bites, it we’re shifting into a different mindset, and it’s important for the modern leader to know that, so then they can move into that confidence.

Heather Bennett  31:56

So what um given? Given like, what this book is meant to do, what is the one question that leaders, and I would include board directors as well, should be asking before a new technology is added to an organization? I’m gonna leave it broad like a new technology, because everything’s moving so quickly, I could name one, and who knows. So what’s that one question that those leaders need to be asking before they invest in a new technology,

Jody Jankovsky  32:28

take the technology out of the equation. That’s my ask the question. Ask the question of, why? What is the outcome? Why do we need this? How does this align? It sounds almost cliche to communicate this way. What I have seen is the shiny object syndrome of all business leaders.

Heather Bennett  32:52

They see something that this week, at least twice,

Jody Jankovsky  32:57

they see the Teck. It’s gonna be a magic wand. You know it’s gonna, it’s gonna solve all my operational problems, cuz the sales guy I talked to made me feel so good about it. It’s gonna solve all of it. If there’s one question is, if it feels good coming out of a out of a demo, you are, you are about to get ticked. Okay, you’re gonna be, you’re gonna you’re, you’re feeling good about it. Disconnects your brain from, why? How does this integrate with our strategic direction of this organization? You got to make that connection that that has got to be fully fleshed out with multiple stakeholders. Okay, so let’s, let’s get, let’s take an example. Let’s say that anecdotally, we see a challenge with customer service, communication or information that’s being provided to customer service because we’re a manufacturer. Let’s say it’s like, hey, we need these guys to be in lockstep, and they’re not, oh, CRM, throw it in there. Rock and roll. Okay, then when you really back into it, what does the customer service organization, what’s their perspective on the problem? What’s the manufacturing what’s the operations people perspective? What’s the sales perspective of the problem? Because you might find a completely different solution, which happens all the time. It’s like when, when business leaders become myopic, that that a technology equates to a pain point being removed. It’s never that simple. There’s so much nuance around it. And there’s a, I call it the circle of innovation, that you start in the middle with whatever the challenge is, whatever that opportunity is. And that challenge, or I call it, chop that. Challenge or opportunity needs to be dissected by the business leaders and the stakeholders that surround it. You can’t delegate it to it. You can’t just say, I’ve got this problem. You go, find me a solution, completely ineffective approach to technological advancement. It starts with, what is the what is this challenge or opportunity in the business. Let’s get perspective on it before we start taking state, taking steps.

Heather Bennett  35:27

I love that you say that one of our former guests, Allison Cummins, of blue outcomes, talks about one of the reasons that her company has been so successful is that they really take into consideration staying with the company in the organization long enough to make sure every stakeholder, which it sounds like you, do as well. So that must be, that’s a consistency I’m seeing in technology companies that that are successful, is you have to make sure you hang around long enough so that and you’re aware of and get the information from all the stakeholders, including the customers of that organization, the employees, the internal people, the external people, the vendors, everyone involved needs to have their own say about what this technology is going to do, how it’s going to work and and being aware of that, I think that’s probably one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned the last 10 years is that you need to understand every stakeholders perspective and how they’re going to integrate with a new technology, new methodology. This is so the great, excellent, excellent point, so that

Jody Jankovsky  36:35

Allison does a great job in that too, connecting the dots of like, like change. It’s like a part of change management, it’s bringing in people, and what is this effect on them? As part of it, there are a there’s a hill of dead bodies, of technological failures in every organization that I’ve ever come across, the amount of technology debt that they carry because of misinformed and knee jerk and shiny object decision making. It’s the millions and millions of wasted dollars makes my heart hurt for the modern business person. It. It’s so at times, it’s so flippant. I’m amazed to go down paths with such recklessness. In a way, I kind of look at it as recklessness. It’s kind of like guessing, and they’re and they’re betting, like hundreds of 1000s and millions of dollars without a, let’s call it disciplined approach, which, which, by the way, they would never do in any other part of their organization. No, and all of a sudden, their brains turn off. When it comes to it, it’s like we’re just going to either delegate, I don’t understand it, therefore I delegate. The TQ model is intended to say I’m not going to just, I’m going to understand so I can delegate responsibly, or that I can hold accountability. So, yeah, at some point you have to hand off the technological aspects of it. But there’s the business alignment, the intersection that has to be fully described, because now you’ve got the, let’s call it the framework to solve Excellent,

Heather Bennett  38:20

yeah, a little strategic thinking goes a long way. And relying on the Council of those, those advisors, the wise ones, that help us get through is so important. This has been great. I do have one last question, but before I ask it, I wanted to make sure I point our listeners to to to where they can find you. So Jody can be found at his company’s website, Blacklineit.com or his personal website, which talks more about technology intelligence at Jsquared.ai, and it’s spelled just the way you think it is. Jsquared.ai so if you were what is one hard lesson that while starting and growing your business that you would like to share so that other CEOs and entrepreneurs could avoid it?

Jody Jankovsky  39:18

I think my my journey has been one where, like, there’s certain things you can avoid, right, right, right? So if you want to embark on that journey across the ocean that you have no idea what’s on the other side of it, that’s kind of what starting a business is like. It’s like you can prepare yourself as best you can with what you know and what you understand, but be prepared for the fact that that along the way there’s going to be storms you never could anticipate. There are. Are obstacles you never dreamed of. There’s blind spots that will potentially sink you. So I guess the perspective I would have is, if you’re up for that, that’s why there’s such I believe a small number of businesses that are founder led, that survive is that is a that’s a very difficult world. It just has been at the same time. It also is extremely fulfilling, and has been part of my I guess career not only career development, it’s essential to career development to have those challenges as well as it’s, I believe, made me a better person and a better Business Leader, to be able to resonate and empathize with other business leaders. When we’re in conversations, I’m like, yeah, like you said, like, shiny object stuff, wasted money, wasted time, of unsuccessful projects. I’m like, Man, I know that in the IT side, it function, Boy, I’ve seen it with you, and I, and I, we’re here to help you get that taken care of. But then you also have, oh, we had these, this employee leave, this employee took trade secrets. I’m like, oh, man, I’ve, I’ve actually been there too. I’ve actually seen that whole thing happen. Or, you know, the sales team, you know, I he was a key guy, and he left, and he left all the contacts, and all of a sudden, like, Nah, Mohan, I know what that feels like, too. And I feel like that’s a it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be so much. What to what to avoid, I suppose, is to expect the, yeah, expect that that’s going to happen with the intention that you can get through it at the same time, right? There’s next door. I’ve always seen there’s, there’s always a solution. I’ve just learned, I’ve seen that, and it’s really been there’s always a solution. There always is. I’ve I just believe that. So if another leader believes that there’s always a solution, find it and just have the perseverance to get

Heather Bennett  42:18

through it. That is great advice. Jody, thank you so much for sharing. There’s so much wisdom. I can’t wait to go over the show notes and see everything you shared. It’s really phenomenal. And I know that your book, technology intelligence is going to make a real difference helping business leaders. So thank you. Thank you so much. You’re welcome,

Jody Jankovsky  42:41

and I hope so. I figure if, if, if one person hears this, or one person reads that book, and it changes things, well, then I believe I’ve accomplished my mission. I really believe that you know the the economics of of what we do in this world, what we leave behind, is measured differently, and I’d rather just influence people’s lives based upon my own experience and of people else other people can gain from that. I’m that I’ve reached my goal. So thank you very much. Thanks for giving me the platform, Heather for doing this. It’s It’s really been fun, and it’s always nice to talk about these kind of

Heather Bennett  43:23

things. Excellent, excellent. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure. So I’ve been interviewing Jody Jankovsky, the CEO, founder of Blackline. It and now Blackline, good job rebranding, by the way. And this is the Growth + Exit Growth + Exit podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

Outro 43:49

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