From 100 Workflows to 12: A CRM Reset with Bryan Ossa

Jen sits down with Bryan Ossa, Co-Founder and COO of Cartographer Consulting, and one of the four finalists selected for the AI & Tech Showdown opening keynote at TMSA ELEVATE.

Bryan shares the story behind a CRM transformation for a transportation brokerage managing more than 1,000 shipments per month. Faced with notification overload, duplicate records, and conflicting automation, the company was struggling to keep track of customer requests and was close to abandoning its CRM altogether.

In this episode, Jen and Bryan explore the operational realities behind CRM success, why over-engineering automation can create more problems than it solves, and what it takes to turn a system teams avoid into one they actually rely on.

Check out the Transportation Sales and Marketing Association (TMSA) website or engage with us on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Welcome To On The Move

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 0:22

Hello, everyone, and welcome to On the Move, a show where we share transportation sales and marketing success stories. I am Jennifer Carpis Romain, Executive Director at the Transportation Marketing and Sales Association, a trade nonprofit educating and connecting marketing and sales professionals in transportation and logistics. And today on the show, I have Brian Osa, COO at Cardographer Consulting. Welcome to the show, Brian. How are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Hi there, Jennifer. Appreciate you having me. And yeah, absolute pleasure to be here. And overall, doing fantastic. I mean, it's like it's always it's always a good day to have conversations like this, if you know what I mean. So yeah.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 1:03

Absolutely. I'm excited to have you on the show.

Brian’s Path Into CRM Architecture

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 1:07

Uh, tell us about your role at Carter Rapper Consulting and how you found your way into well, this is a little sneak peek into CRM architecture and operational systems inside the logistics industry.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Absolutely. Yeah. So uh so my role essentially, I merged my business um with my business partner, Danielle. Uh she and I kind of have been chatting together and in the HubSpot and the operations ecosystem for several years at this point. We've both been using HubSpot for north of a decade apiece. Uh, was a former HubSpotter myself, uh, and then just over time just started understanding how different things were fragmented across, you know, marketing, sales, operations, IT, et cetera. And then once you've been in each one of those different spaces, you kind of realize that, hey, this thing is broken in marketing, actually maybe related to something that's happening in sales, or the thing that's broken in sales actually is problematic because of customer success. And so that exposure and just seeing a lot of that is kind of what led uh like each of us to independently start our own independent consultancies uh that we had been doing respectively for several years. But then about two years ago or so, we started chatting a little bit more about hey, what would it look like if we joined forces? And then at the beginning of last year, we kind of came together, forged cartographer consulting, and that was how everything started going forward. Because we're just like, all right, well, let's draw a business map. What's a good map, Motif? A cartographer. Great, let's go with that. Uh, and so we started working on that. And then uh as we're kind of taking on different clients and figuring out, you know, who do we want to be focusing on primarily because we don't want to just be shooting in every different direction, uh, because how you do this in education is very different than how you do this in supply chain. Uh, we want, we just were listening to who's having these different pain points and isn't getting that solved. And we started getting a few uh clients who are I like in some way, shape, and form on the supply chain, mostly in freight shipping, who are just saying, like, we have everything squared away from the actual hardware fulfillment or like the actual freight fulfillment. But when it comes to like managing the software side of things, we're there's no one to help us. Like, please, please help us solve that. And so through a few different projects that we were working on with clients there, that's what kind of led us down this avenue. And then uh a few of them started mentioning the acronym TMSA and dated. And then after researching that further, that's how we found our way into the organization and then decided great, let's let's get the membership going. This seems like a great community to kind of like share ideas, and it has been in the time that we've been there, and we're just looking forward to just trying to continue to like pay that forward so that others don't have to face some of the same pain points that we know we've faced over the years.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 4:14

Absolutely.

Why Systems Must Align Teams

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 4:15

And I really liked what you said about like all that stuff is interconnected, right? Your marketing, your sales, your customer support, your customer service. Like, we're even seeing more like customer support, customer experience people coming into TMSA because all of these systems and all these departments are aligned. And especially sales and marketing, you your ultimate goal is revenue. You're just at a different part of those conversations. And so if your teams aren't aligned and your systems aren't aligned, then something's gotta get like there's going to be a ball that drops somewhere. And one of the hardest parts is when you have the teams aligned, but then your systems aren't able to accommodate that.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

Exactly.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 4:56

And so I think that's really great that like you guys have been like, okay, yes, let's help map our way through this and help you guys really achieve that. Because at the end of the day, you want your systems to support your humans. And if it's causing more friction points for them, that's not going to make anyone successful.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

No, it it's it's not valuable at all. And you're uh entirely right on that whole philosophy.

The Problem With RevOps Thinking

SPEAKER_01 5:20

And so that's why uh, you know, in the last couple of years, we've seen the term like RevOps get really popular. Just personally, in my mind, I think that's another joggon term, and I hate it actually, because like here's my hot take like RevOps is absolute like is garbage because it only focuses on driving increased demand and revenue. Wonderful. But what if you like that neglects anything that is behind the scenes operationally, whether that is your tech infrastructure or your behind the scene, uh behind the scenes teams like your accounting, your finance, uh, or even your legal team. And so it's important to consider your entire business operations ecosystem, not just the revenue-driving ones, because if you don't have that behind-the-scenes infrastructure put into place operationally, technically, like it's all gonna fall apart. And so that's a lot of our mentality. It's like focus on people, like people first, technology and operations, and able the people, not the other way around, and look at this from the lens of the entire business, not just any one facet or even a couple of facets. It needs to be holistic.

Customer Success As A Sales Driver

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 6:26

Yeah, I think that's so important. I remember one time I was doing a speaking presentation and I was like, I just need four people to come on stage. You don't have to do anything, you just need to sit in these chairs because it was like I was on a stage and there was like chairs behind me because there was a panel before whatever, and only two people came up to sit in the chairs. I'm like, okay, perfect. Sales and marketing, HR and um like customer support. You didn't even show up to the conversation. This makes sense, or accounting, because when we're talking about like creating that efficiency and like customer support and being there for your customers, anyone that's talking to the customer is part of that. It's not just your customer support team, or it's not just sales, or it's not just what you're putting out in marketing, it's all of those pieces. So, like I always like think about that too. Like, you can have the best marketing, you could have the best sales, you can have a great accounting team. But if it's really complicated to pay you, you are creating a who wants to bottleneck that part of the process, and two, you could then be having customers that are incredibly frustrated with you because a part of their process is clunky and hard. And you're not even focusing on that because you're just focusing on account management or just focusing on sales. It needs to be all of those pieces.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Yeah, exactly. Right. And that's where it's say you can take some pages out of the playbook from, like, you know, for all intents and purposes, and like not to get any opinions on it, but like Amazon, for example, like that's where like their customer success tends to really, really shine because you start off on like, and I'm looking at specifically like, hey, look, you have an issue with something, what is the issue? You answer like two or three questions, and a lot of times the bot, like the bot can take care of it for you. And if not, you chat with a person, and it's almost always less than five minutes, and you get your problem resolved. And that is pretty that's a pretty universal experience of just showing just how effective like customer success can be in the long in the long-term scheme of things, and why it's as integral to the sales process as marketing is, as sales is, and as everything else could be. Because if that were if that were to break down, you know, that's gonna affect people's opinions, and that opinions are going to lead to word of mouth refer uh like negative referrals, and uh you don't want to have uh detractors coming into your business. You want to you want to try and keep as positive sentiment as you can, and that is only something that can happen from a like holistic cultures perspective.

TMSA Elevate Showcase Preview

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 9:00

Absolutely. And you mentioned at the beginning that you guys came in to TMSA as partner members and um you kept hearing about TMSA in your business partner, Danielle and I connected. She actually told me that she watches this podcast, which is pretty cool. Um nice to know that there are people that sit and listen to these interviews. Um but with that, then you guys decided to submit for our opening keynote, and you're one of our finalists. So this year at TMSA Elevate, which is June 7th through 9th in Denver, we are doing an AI and tech showcase showdown where we're gonna have four finalists compete to show us actual tech or AI. And it's not what you can do one day or what you're hoping to achieve for someone. It's something that you guys have actually done yourselves or for one of your clients to showcase how technology can actually help our teams be more efficient. So, what made you tell us a little bit, give us a little teaser, don't give us our your whole presentation. Of course, yeah, we need people to still come to show. But tell us a little bit about um the UK, the use case that you submitted and why that's the one that you chose.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Sure. Uh,

Freight Brokerage Intake Form Overhaul

SPEAKER_01 10:10

so ultimately, like there's there's a lot of these use cases that actually wind up happening. The big problem just winds up being sharing them and letting people know that, hey, look, we built this uh because you don't really like when you're practitioning on all of it, it's just so second nature to you that you don't even realize that it can actually be beneficial to others. And that's something that I often struggle with because I just forget that. Uh, but this was one that, like, as we're working through it, like in summary, uh, we had like we had a client who don't like it freight brokerage, uh, who was trying to just figure out how to streamline and keep organized their intake form. And they're just like they wanted to keep everything uh so that they had a one-stop shop. So whether or not you're looking, you wanted to be a uh like broker agent or you wanted to request any kind of like shipping like shipping help, getting the quote, or even saying, come pick the like running the pickup request. They wanted all of that to route through one system, uh, ideally as clean and automated as possible. And they're like, I mean, we can we I've tried to self-solve this. I've built however many different like automations, tools, things, and whatever, and it's still causing problems. So help. And so we kind of were working through that, and they're like just the anecdotal feedback that we were getting from them throughout the build process. And then once we deployed it, just the positive sentiment we got of just like holy heck, like this is like this is saving my team literally hours a day on everything tied to this has been like hugely impactful. That we're just like, all right, cool, like we're we're really glad that works. And they're telling us like that they meet with other brokerages who face similar problems. And he he was like, You should talk to people about this, like, should like share, like, feel free to share this out. I mean, there's a degree of anonymity to it, obviously, but like the logic, the logic to it is, you know, if you're if you're facing, if you're in this position and you're trying to accomplish an like a centralized intake form or an intake process or just enable the team, logically speaking, you're probably gonna be flowing that same kind of process. It's just what tools you plug in, how what processes your team follow, and making sure that your team is equipped to do that.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 12:42

And in that, like in your submission, you you mentioned that there was more than 100 automated workflows, and they were all creating this noise and conflict, and it was so confusing. And you mentioned this, like that freight brokerage and was talking to other people, and they were having problems too. Like, how common is that type of kind of over-engineering when company companies implement CRM platforms?

SPEAKER_01 13:04

Uh

Workflow Bloat And AI Shortcuts

SPEAKER_01 13:05

I think it boils down to a perspective of perceived, like perceived simplicity versus actual simplicity. And a lot of the tools, like I know HubSpot is a kind of a big challenge point on this, in all honesty, in that they try and make something seem ex like very accessible until you're in it. And then you realize, wow, there's actually so much to this, and I don't even know what I don't know, and it becomes overwhelming. And in an attempt to understand and do that, you're going to turn to a lot of the AI tools that are available now. And HubSpot's built-in one is Breeze, which is garbage. Uh, but well, hot take there. Uh, but you'll start leveraging that and say, here's what I want to build, and then the like the bot will build you your workflow, and then you're gonna trust that this works, and like it very well may not, and that it and then before you know it, you're like, okay, this thing is built, okay, this one thing is fixed, but these two other things aren't. And because you're not sure what part is or isn't working, the next perceived step is to take the next direct solution, and then that's just gonna create all kinds of bloat. And then before long, you have so much of these different bloat factors that you're not even sure what is doing what anymore, and you're gonna have conflict between each one of the tools, uh, not tools, sorry, each one of the workflows, and then you may have one workflow that is automatically creating like a deal, like creating a new deal, and then another workflow that is as soon as it sees a deal create, automatically move it to this stage. And but you don't want that to happen except in these certain scenarios. But as you're kind of dictating to the tool, I want you to do this, like the if-then logic is what gets lost uh very easily, and the complexity behind it is what becomes the pain point, and that's where you start having like the different experts and the consultants who are saying, Hey, I have this way of doing it, I have that way of doing it, uh, and you start focusing so much on the theory that you're just like, I just want this to work. I just tactically want to pay attention to this and then help me understand the theory behind how I need to be thinking about this so I can replicate that logic for future builds instead of just trying to like guess and apply.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 15:35

I think something that you said at the beginning there was really important. You talked about okay, if you don't understand exactly what's going wrong, you turn now to the AI tool to fix it. And I think this is important because a fan of AI, I talk to my chat bot all the time. I understand she's not a real person, but she does help me a lot. And but I still know there's even like I was doing something actually like very similar to HubSpot workflow earlier, and I'm like, but what about this? And I had to keep asking questions and be like, because I don't think that you're actually understanding what I'm telling you, robot. And you still need that human expertise to understand how to then, because then if I can do it exactly and tell her exactly what I'm looking for, how to do it, and understand where like the hiccups will be, then it still makes it easier because she can like do the prompts and do all the stuff, make me move faster. But if you're not having that like human check factor, if you're forgetting who the expert is, if you will, and you're just relying on the technology, you may miss those things. And like you said, especially on a workflow, one step can affect every other step. And like those are things that we we uncover all the time, like because we've been building um these new tracks for TMSA, and so we're doing a lot of workflows inside of HubSpot and like making sure that people get the right information. But if this per if we put the wrong list attached to the wrong workflow, it's sending to all the wrong people, or if we don't have opt-out in this part of the the process, then people are getting, or even like our our when we send like the member um form, like different people get different memberships and thus they get a different membership form. And like you have to make sure all those criteria is met. And if you don't realize where where it's not, then it has a ripple effect through through all of it.

SPEAKER_01 17:36

Yeah, you're you're entirely right. That and that that's that's the big trick on the AI side of things because even a well-trained, like even the well-trained machine is still prone to bias or errors and just the contextual relevancy. And so like like I've been like I've been like generative AI has been a passion projects and something I've been studying for, you know, like 15 years plus. I've been like I was at it, I was at an AI startup back in like probably 10, 12 years ago, working on so like social speech and sentiment, uh, and just understanding like here, like how you can trace the patterns between the two in order to serve the output for what user is looking for. And just like just learning about that, seeing the evolution of uh like the prompting strategies and the context that you need to uh apply, and just diving down that rabbit hole is a whole other conversation. But just seeing that evolution just shows the importance of consistency and documentation and how you need to, to your point, have that human expert in the room, yeah. But in more importantly than that, is even though you have that human expert in the room, you still need that contextual relevancy. And so that's the importance, which is often overlooked, of documentation and keeping that documentation one accurate and two ex uh two accessible so that you can understand like what it is, how it works, and when it was last touched, so that you know how it applies to the ecosystem that you're working in.

Documentation That Stays Current

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 19:15

I think that's so important. And I love that you added the last time the documentation was touched because we were talking before we went um live here, but like especially in HubSpot, but all tech tools, they change where things are, right? So, like there's been processes that I've documented, and then literally three months later, I go to replicate the process, and all the buttons are in different places. And so it's not that the process is wrong, it's just the process has changed, and now you need to update that documentation to base on now where those buttons are or where those pieces are. And so I do think part of if you're like that process documentation needs to be like regular checking in or like acknowledging, oh, okay, we know that there was a system update. We have to go update the processes now, especially if you have like team turnover or anything like that. Because if I was the person looking at the document I created and then I knew what was wrong, if there's a brand new person coming in, they're gonna be like, nothing is right. You just set me up to fail because you just gave me a document and it was completely wrong.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Exactly. Yeah, and and that's and like that's why we use like you know, just like our side tangent, just like us being like the Google ecosystem space, like we leverage a combination of like good, like Google Drive, Notebook LM, and Claude for our internal documentation. And then it's just whatever the thing that is built is basically the Google Doc. That Google Doc is fed into the relevant notebook LM, which is a queryable reference tool. And then we just make sure that the main tool that we're using, Claude, is referencing that notebook that is regularly getting updates from the individual things, and then as there, like and periodically we'll just ping and just say, Hey, look, check the documentation on Claude. Is there anything that is obvious like do deep research? Is there anything that needs updating? If so, tell us so that we can update it, and then we go from there. And that consistent cycle, especially now when you can set it up to be agentic in that way, uh, can start like you're almost to the point of being able to run it automatically, but I would caution against that because you still want to have that check and balance to make sure, hey, this is actually accurate. Uh, and then you can run that and keep it in, keep it in good play.

Maximize The Minimal Workflow Design

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 21:24

I think that's really great advice. I almost think too, like, especially when we were talking about the workflows and such, sometimes it's not just it's not about adding more automation, but it's simplifying the architecture. It's doing less because then there's less there's less documentation needed if there's less stuff. So like, um, and that was actually what you did for your clients. So, what was kind of that mindset shift to make that possible to like take what they had and then really be able to simplify it down?

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Absolutely. Uh, and so the the mindset there was trying to like we wanted to maximize. Maximize the minimal is kind of the philosophy that we leverage where appropriate. And so a good example of this is when you create when you create a form, the law uh you may have it do a variety of different steps. And so depend uh a lot of the ways of thinking are okay, well, depending on all these different steps I want to do, I want to maybe want to create three or four workflows to do each one of these steps so that if any time I want to change, I don't need to go hunt for it in this one big thing. I just look for that individual workflow. The problem with that is that it becomes a like it becomes a lot of bloat, and you then need to be policing any other update that is tough that has that potential enrollment logic. Versus if you have those, you consolidate those four workflow steps into one larger workflow that just has that set period of enrollment criteria uh conditions, and then you have the if-then logic that breaks down accordingly under that umbrella. That actually, even though it may be more annoying to search through that one main workflow, it actually gives you way more in terms of checks and balances because the enrollment criteria and then the if-then logic gates really act as a barrier of entry to prevent unwanted things from happening. And so that was exactly the uh philosophy we approached with this client, where you know, we had these hundred, uh, I think there were 180 workflows when we started on it. Uh, and we realized, okay, of these 180 workflows, there were maybe a dozen or so that definitely needed to stand on their own because they're they're operational ones. And yes, even though we could combine them with something else, there's just so much uh there's so much data flowing through those individual workflows that we don't want that to potentially bloat these other workflows that are more complex. And so we were able to keep consulting like we kept those ones there, and then the other ones are just okay, this is doing the same thing as that, let's get rid of it. This one is basically this one's not even on, who cares? This one's only half baked. And like consolidating down what do you operationally want to do, focus on like what does your team need to do? What is the process that's involved there, and then build the workflow that you need for that and see and like clean up everything else that you don't need?

SPEAKER_02 24:30

Mm-hmm.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 24:31

And we talked a lot about like the systems, the tech, it enables our humans, and then making that more simple, taking away all that bloat, making it easier. What then actually changed for the team once all that noise was gone?

SPEAKER_01 24:47

Yeah.

What Changed After Simplification

SPEAKER_01 24:48

So what once all that noise was gone, the biggest impact was that they were able to start moving forward on the things that actually mattered. And so what I mean, what I mean by that is like, for example, they get it, they get an inbound uh like quote request. There's no longer all this admin of just like, okay, I need to go in the HubSpot deal and enter, like they call uh called me or they filled out this form, and I need to manually copy and paste all the details related to the shipping requests all in the HubSpot record, and then I need to move it over to this next deal stage. Now I need to hop over into the TMS and I need to up like copy and paste all the data over, and then I need to go back to HubSpot, send them an email, blah, blah, blah, and just kind of go through that whole frustration. It's just simplified of just okay, cool. I got I got this re I got this request, and uh great, the deal, like the deal is automatically created for me, and I got a notification that I need to check it out. I look at it and it says, okay, cool, here's the reference number that you should use, and here's the process that I need. And like now I have four different dropdowns that tell me the process I need to do to create that record in the TMS. And once the TMS, once I've created that in the TMS, then I just provide a comparable tracking link. I'm not gonna worry about HubSpot anymore because I'm managing the rest in the TMS, at least until we get the integration set up, which we're working on right now. Uh and that simplified, like that took what at least like 15 to like 15, 20 minutes uh of effort, maybe, maybe less five or 10, uh, but per quote where if you're getting a few dozen quotes a day, that adds up to you know, two minutes, two minutes each. Or uh, and like that's just one example. Uh, another one is like the like the accounting team, just like if you're getting like there's so new notifications coming in, but if you have a lot of those notifications that are just, you know, um the the carrier has picked up the shipment, you don't care. The client sees that it doesn't matter, you don't need to be notified about that. But because you're getting 150, 200 of those a day, that's going to silence out the one customer question that's like, hey, look, I have a damaged claim and I need help. And you don't want to miss that because that's potentially problematic.

Cutting Notification Noise And Misses

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 27:09

Yeah, I'm thinking about my own life. Like I at TMSA, obviously, as the executive director, I get notified about everything. And then I I feel like they're definitely my inbox is special. Um, so but I try to make sure that I never miss anything, but part of that noise, like I should be better at like taking some things off um that I don't need to see as relevant as other pieces. Um, you know, you don't want to miss that important communication that you need to follow up on rather than just the things that are like for your knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Yeah. Yeah,

Personal Inbox Filtering Quick Win

SPEAKER_01 27:44

that that's absolutely something that's valuable. And like, you know, a a quick hit that you can do just on your own personal machine, not even worrying about CRM, is just like go like if you're using if you're using uh Gmail, just set up set up um inbox filtering and automatic routing. You can you can do that just by like creating a filter and turning it on automated, and then you can simply just flag tag move certain things to do, whatever you need to do. Like we have, like I have that set up in our inbox where whenever we get something for like a like a software invoice, like invoice or receipt, it automatically forwards it over to uh our account, like our accounting email inbox, and then archives the email because I mean, I don't care. That is always going to be the same process no matter what, and I don't want that filling my inbox, and then I don't need to worry about it.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 28:34

Yeah, I think that makes sense. That's really good advice. So we talked about, I'm just excited to watch you take the stage at Elevate and really like we've talked through so many pieces of this, um, but really being able to show that use case to attendees. So without giving away everything, what do you think attendees will see when you take the stage for the AI and technology showdown?

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Yeah,

What Attendees Will See Onstage

SPEAKER_01 28:57

so the so the experience for this is largely going to be very visual. And what I mean by that is not that I'm going to be full, like I'm not really gonna be focusing so much on here's exactly how to build it in HubSpot, because realistic, like there's a lot involved there. But I do want to spend uh a lot of time at least showing like at an infrastructure level, here is the architecture of the system that we actually developed. And like, here's what the form looks like, and here's how is that uh here's how that is connected to various different objects and properties, and then showing how all of that is interconnected within the system, and then kind of conveying the logic that you need to be thinking about in order to build that. That's the intention. Because once you have that philosophy, replication becomes easy because it's real like the replication is real like you just it's tactical. It's I want to create a property, how do I do that? I want to create a workflow, how do I do that? But if you know exactly what it is you need to build, that like those processes are infinitely more simplified than if you're still trying to figure out what you need to build and how to build it.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 30:11

Absolutely. Well, if you want to hear from Brian and our other three finalists that will take the stage during our opening keynote, join us June 7th through 9th in Denver. But I always feel like I can tell my voice changes when I do the little prompt for elevate, but I'm excited. It's always cool to see technology used in a real functional way, and that's what we really wanted to present with this keynote is like these are real tools that can help you today, not something that could potentially help you tomorrow, but you can really dive in and think through like even I in this conversation and thinking through our own workflows and how we can improve just by some of the things that you said. So uh thank you so much for coming on the show. I do have one last question for you. This

Advice To A Younger Self

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 30:53

is a question I ask everybody who comes on the show. So if you could go back in time and advise your younger self anything, and this could be personally or professionally, when would you go back to and what would you say?

SPEAKER_01 31:05

That's like great question. Uh and I would honestly, I would probably go back to I would go back to myself probably midway through the high school experience. And the thought that I would provide is to really focus less on the process and more on the outcome of what you want to go for. Because it is very easy to find yourself stuck up in the weeds and the blue sky horizon of what if that you like you lose um, that you're going to constantly iterate on the step to make sure you can achieve that blue sky horizon, which obviously is going to move the goal further and further away. But if you're able to go to the point of just saying, okay, hey, this is this is something that I like doing, it's a lot easier to pull in the different pieces of the puzzle to create that, like create that real picture. So in my case, it's basically I like software, I like and I like playing with puzzles. So like let like Legos still play with them as a like, you can't see them because they're all on this side of the wall. Um but so just real like realizing that it's like, okay, cool. So let's build, let's do that for software in a business ecosystem. And if I was able to give that to myself when I was younger, it would have been much easier to find people who could help me figure out how to do this in the direction instead of trying to like guess and check and experience just that whole frustration and friction that I know is still prevalent. It's gotten better, it sounds like, but it's still prevalent in a lot of the education spaces.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 32:48

Absolutely. I think that's really good advice. It's funny. My my son just turned nine and he asked me just yesterday, um, mommy, what do you want me to be when I grow up? And I said, I want you to be like financially stable, but doing something that you actually like to do. Because every job is a job. Like you're never gonna like love getting up every single morning and going to work. That's like crazy talk. But you should you will be most motivated and most happy in your career if you wake up and actually enjoy the work that you that you do, um, and hopefully be financially stable so that you don't have to like worry about all the other pieces. So to catch 22. But that was so I feel like that's kind of what it took you a little bit to figure out on your own, is like, oh, these are the things that I actually like and I can make a career out of it. Um, but you know, it takes us us time to figure out. So I think that's a really good advice. And and most people I feel like that find their way to their career, like if they would have listened to their instincts a little bit more sooner, probably would have been happier sooner, too. So I think that's great advice.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

It's way, it's way easier said than done. And there's all there's a huge part to be said um that is also, you know, what do you want to do and what sounds quality, but also bearing in mind like what is something that you know that you're good at versus something that you may not be so good at. Because initially, the logic that I was kind of explaining here also can be, hey, like puzzle and working together to like figure out, put things together. I really like medicine. And so it was going down the avenue of like epidemiology and then realizing very quickly, hey, look, the hard science is like it's something that is taking me a lot of like a lot of effort and a lot of cons, like a lot of focus, and I'm not great at it. Could I get great at it? Absolutely, but let me think about would I rather go like would I rather be trick like would I rather be treated by myself who had to work really hard in order to figure this stuff out and is still not entirely sure, or someone who just gets it. I would rather be treated by someone who just gets it. And so that like once that clicked, like the skill, like combining in that skill aspect is made things it added a whole new lens of clarity.

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 35:08

Yeah, well, yes, it's important to know ourselves too, and we can't just play with Legos all day and get paid for it, unfortunately. So we'll change. And if your life, and if you change, it's fine, do your thing, it's all good. Yeah, all good.

Closing And Denver Invitation

Jennifer Karpus-Romain 35:22

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so excited to have you guys in TMSA and then also um taking the stage for the opening keynote. So um, I will see you in June, and um, I will catch everybody else on the show next week.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Thank you. Pleasure to have me. Thanks so much.