An Interview with the CEO & Co-Founder of Officium Labs

Pretty good. Pretty good. Thanks for letting me hang out with you. I’m excited to talk with you a little bit and have some fun.

It’s a hard question because I grew up everywhere. My stepdad was in the military, so by the time I was 18, we had lived in about 25 different locations. But I think, you know, the high school years, the formative years, are what you kind of claim as your home. We lived in Texas during that time, in the backwoods of Texas. He had retired and was working, so we lived in Jasper, Texas, and Cleveland, Texas. Those are the areas I went to high school. They’re in deep East Texas, north of Beaumont, northeast of Houston, and that kind of area. So, that’s where we grew up—me and my 10 siblings. I’ve got seven sisters, two brothers, and, of course, myself.

It is, yeah, a big family.

Growing up, we always had a 15-passenger van. There were old Ford and Dodge vans in the 80s and 90s that were 15 passengers, so we had those. And then when we moved, we’d just get a big moving truck. We didn’t have movers because we had 10 kids, right? So, yeah, we were the labor force.

I think what’s interesting is that I grew up mostly in the country. Even though we moved a lot on military bases, the last military base we lived on was when I was 12 or 13. From ages 12 to 18, we lived out in the country. What I always found interesting is that, during that time and even now, there aren’t as many opportunities for people who grow up in the country or live in rural America—or really rural areas anywhere in the world.

As I was growing up, I had a passion for technology. I used to read encyclopedias and almanacs, and I would read atlases and then draw them out. I was just an extra-knowledge kind of kid. Around the age of 13 or 14, it became clear to me that if I wanted to achieve some of these goals and passions, I was going to have to leave the comfort of the country or rural America. So, I went to university in the city at BYU in Utah. While I was there, I realized that if I wanted to land that big tech or business job, I’d have to move from Utah to somewhere else. That’s when I went to Seattle, Washington, then London, San Francisco, and Boston—all tech hubs. I also lived in India for a while.

The biggest lesson I learned as a kid was that if I wanted to chase big dreams, I had to leave rural America. That’s crazy.

Yeah, we live in San Francisco now for about eight years.

I studied business management. I was at BYU for a couple of years while working full-time to pay for school. I worked at a company called Convergys, a call center company. About halfway through, I got an amazing opportunity to leave school during my sophomore year and go work for Microsoft in Seattle as a forecast analyst, which is what I did at Convergys. So, I quit school and decided to go work for Microsoft. This was back in the late ’90s or early 2000s.

Eventually, I finished my degree with the University of Phoenix, because that was one of the requirements my wife had when we got married. She told me, “I’m going to marry you, but you have to finish that degree,” because she knew I wasn’t that passionate about it. So, I did finish it, but my career really took off after Microsoft. I kind of look at my work over the last 25 years as my real education—that’s my PhD.

No, no, no. You’re in a big family, you kind of got to take care of yourself there.

I was in Seattle for a few years, probably about three or four, and then I got an opportunity to be the Director of Outsourcing at Monster.com in Boston. They hadn’t outsourced up to that point, so I came in and launched their outsourcing division. I worked there for a few years.

Everyone has a different approach to their career, but I always wanted to become a CEO someday. That was my goal. When I was 21, I built out a 20-year plan, and at the end of it, I saw myself being a CEO by 41, along with other personal goals. I was a VP and Senior Director at Monster, and I realized I had this 360-degree view, but I also recognized a huge gap in people management and emotional intelligence (EQ).

So, I decided to take a step back and learn from great people leaders. I took what some might call a demotion in my career, working as a business manager and vendor manager—roles that weren’t senior director or VP. I wanted to learn from people who were masters of EQ and people management, like Mark Whitten and Mark Honeycutt at Microsoft. I did that for five years, and then, after I felt like I had the training I needed, I went back into the world, aiming to be a great people-focused leader, along with focusing on other aspects of leadership.

I then joined Symantec in the UK as their Senior Director.

Yeah, so the way I segmented my 20-year plan was into personal and professional goals. Personally, I wanted to buy a house, get married, and have a kid. Professionally, I had goals related to money and titles. When you’re 20, you care about those things more, though less so now. I set all these titles with money attached, but I made sure those titles were in different departments so I could learn how to be a well-rounded CEO when I got there.

I had this goal when I was 21, and I achieved it. I started my own company and became the CEO of Officium Labs at 41. I have a wife, a kid, and I finally bought a house in my upper 30s. All those things came to be. Now, I tell my wife we need to think about the next 20 years, but we’ll see.

I’ve been in the services arena for 20 years. What I noticed is that every company I went to, I’d fix the broken service experience they had. It occurred to me that, globally, roughly $330 billion is lost every year due to poor customer service and customer experience. Most companies have a small internal team and a large outsourced team, called BPOs. The BPO industry is about $230 billion this year and next. I realized someone needed to disrupt that and figure out how to build a best-in-class customer experience that not only gets high CSAT or NPS but actually delivers ROI. And how do you do it in a flexible, nimble way so the cost structures aren’t difficult for these companies?

So my co-founder, Scott, and I walked through the streets of San Francisco and said, “Let’s solve this problem now.” A couple of years ago, we were working inside a company called Forte Labs, a blockchain gaming platform. The CEO was really into decentralization, so we talked to him one day and said, “Hey, why don’t you let us spin out from the company, give us seed money—about $150,000—and let us go disrupt the CX and CS industry?” He said, “Okay, give it a go and see what you can do.”

Two years later, we just hit $10.3 or $10.5 million in gross revenue this month. We went from a $150,000 loan to $10 million in less than two years, with 30 clients across three different sectors. We thought, “Let’s try this out and see if our ideas resonate. Is there a market fit?” In the first two months, we were profitable. Then we thought, “Okay, let’s lean into this.” And that’s what we’ve done over the last two years—it’s been super successful. People want change. They want a better customer experience, and they want experts who have been doing this for 20-plus years to help them craft that.

We have three main product lines. The first one is called Connect, and you can think of it as the Uber of customer service. We have on-demand customer service professionals around the globe who can plug in and work by the hour for our clients. We have a lot of gaming clients, but also serve other industries.

The second is called Transform. This is when we help companies transform to become best-in-class, delivering ROI and driving value. If you think about it, you buy products because you love them. So when it comes to services, all you want is to get back to what you love—the product. You just need the support to go back to what you love because the company has built a great product for you. But as companies grow, that service can get lost.

The last one is Innovate, which is our lab space. We focus on what’s coming next—what ideas will be new in 5 to 10 years. It’s about thinking ahead, doing the R&D, testing, and making the necessary investments now so we can roll out new innovations in the future.

Well, I can’t share all the details, but what I can say is that I think the future of service—whether it’s 10 years or 20 years from now—will depend on the natural progression of language-based bots and similar technologies. A couple of years ago, when I was in Finland, I pitched an idea for 2025 or 2030. I said, if you’ve ever watched Marvel, and you know who Jarvis is, imagine having a Jarvis-like system for customer service for every product you own. That’s where service is heading.

It’s not just about getting answers to your questions instantly, but also having everything on the backend work for you. Now, think about it this way: if you decide on January 1 that you’re going to go on a diet and lose 20 pounds, and person A makes that decision, while person B makes the decision and buys a dog—who is more likely to be walking and probably losing weight in six months? It’s going to be person B with the dog because they have a companion.

Now, imagine Jarvis as your customer service companion, your in-product companion, your new friend. You’re going to see much higher product adoption if customers feel like they have a relationship with the service team—whether that’s Jarvis or something in between. The key is not to commoditize your service team. Instead, leverage them to become revenue generators and give them the autonomy and authority to truly engage with customers and help them get back to what they love.

When you do that, you change the mindset of your product, sales, and marketing teams, as well as transform how customers view your company. That’s the critical part. So as you think about R&D in the next five or 10 years, you’re focusing on products and services that follow this path. There are a lot of potential applications I can’t share yet, but imagine those kinds of possibilities.

A lot of companies, as they grow, don’t think about how the customer journey branches. What they do is try to optimize for those branches, but they don’t connect them back together to create a unified experience. The companies that are forward-thinking—whether they’re startups, mid-sized, or large companies—are the ones that bring those branches back together so it feels like a unified experience for the customer. Even if the backend is a little all over the place, as long as the “bed” is made nicely underneath, it’s not as important how it’s done behind the scenes.

I had an old boss who used to say, “You’re always on stage. Perception is reality.” You don’t know when the curtains open, so you’ve got to create that unified experience for the customer and figure out the backend as a company.