Ariana (00:00:07) - Welcome to Secret Ops, the podcast uncovering the world of business operations, one episode at a time. I'm your host, Ariana Cofone, and today's guest is John Qualye, chief of staff at Four Growers. John, welcome to Secret Ops. So lovely to have you today.

John (00:00:23) - Thank you for having me on. I'm happy to be here.

Ariana (00:00:25) - John, I'm really excited to jump in with you because we're gonna be talking about things that we have not talked about yet on Secret Ops, like robotics and automation and supply chain logistics. Before we go into all of that, I wanna know your journey and where you started and how you got into operations.

John (00:00:45) - So I started my career with an undergraduate degree in graphic design. So the first four to five years of my career I spent in marketing departments doing logos, business cards, websites, trade show material, you name it. From that, after the first five or so years, I eventually got into freelancing full-time and along that journey I had a client that needed back of the house, operations help, just little stuff here and there. And I felt that, I didn't know much about it and thought I'd throw my hat in the ring to see if I could help them out. And so I did. And that was kind of the point where I switched my focus from design more towards operations. And from that point it was just kind of like a jumping off, rocket ship where I was doing less and less design and more operations, more entrepreneurship type things.

John (00:01:34) - I did end up going into the entrepreneurship community here in Pittsburgh, and they kind of encouraged me to do my own project. So I did try a few startups on my own. One was a social calendar company, the other was a FinTech company where we would automate tax payments for freelancers. And I also did a news brand that covered the innovation and entrepreneurship spheres here in Pittsburgh. I also had a cup of coffee in angel investments, mostly on the pre-seed fund, so checks ranging from anything from a hundred to 150k per check. But I would say over the last five years I've kind of doubled down on operations as a consultant, a freelancer, and a fractional Chief of Staff. And then in the summer of 2021, I joined the company I'm with now, which is Four Growers and I'm a full-time Chief of Staff for them.

Ariana (00:02:27) - Lots to unpack there, because you might be one of the first people I've talked to in operations that started with design. I would love to understand how visually translating things got brought into operations. I think you're the first person I have talked to that started in design. How do you think operations and design connect together? How do you think they work together.

John (00:02:51) - Well, I think initially you can look at, on a design project, you need to figure out everything about it. So you know, what is the goal, what is it being used for, what medium are you creating in, how is it going to be perceived? What are the finer details of the arts art pieces themselves? And so that attention to detail really translates to operations where in the same vein, you're still going through the same questions of what are the goals here? Who are the stakeholders, what are the, the decisions that need to be made? And then going into that even a deeper sense of who do you need to be involved, how do you distribute the work? Do you have a team underneath you? And then just kind of carrying those things out so not only do you start in the beginning, but you also carry out the entire project and being a project manager of sorts. So I would say overall the translation is really that attention to detail.

Ariana (00:03:46) - Wow. That is, I assume that also ties into how you develop and rollout processes too. I think that's one of the things that I have a sticking point in when I'm creating operations for a business is also figuring out all the pieces that you just talked about, but also how to present that back to the team and to clients and customers. I'm sure that design knowledge is invaluable to that experience and figuring out how to connect the dots and what's working and what's being adopted versus what's not being adopted.

John (00:04:17) - Exactly. And with every project, you really have to nail down of like every single step of what could go right, what could go wrong if X then Y and really play that out over a large scale. And that way by the time you go to your stakeholders or colleagues or even your clients, you can say, here's everything I've thought about. Here's our best path forward. Here's our backup plans, and if everything goes correctly, here's the deadlines, the costs and everything you might need with that.

Ariana (00:04:45) - Hmm. What a holistic view to be able to look through at a lens. It's really encompassing the whole end-to-end process of it. So I wanna jump into the entrepreneurial side of it as well, because you have that experience starting things from the ground up. How do you think that has influenced your side of operations and how you approach operations? Again, I think a lot of people who are in operations have dipped into starting their own thing, so what connections do you see there?

John (00:05:13) - Yeah, when you do your own projects or you host your own events, or even going to the point of starting your own company, you really have an appreciation for how much work it actually takes. Because essentially you're doing everything when you're a team of one or maybe a team of two to three, you really have to encompass everything. And I do mean everything because if you don't have a process in place, well guess what? You're going to create it. If you don't know about X, Y, Z, maybe that's on the HR side or the marketing side or a product side, you're gonna do the work to research it and at least build out a playbook. So coming from the founder type into operations, it's more so I'm okay with doing everything under the sun to get this across the goal line, right? There isn't that, you know, complaining of, oh, maybe this isn't my sweet spot and it might not be, but you're okay with doing it because it needs done and you're the person on the team, or as a solo founder, you're the person to do it. So it's really about work ethic and getting everything done despite whether you like it or not.

Ariana (00:06:17) - Mm-hmm. It's too true. People ask me, how could you clean data all day? It's like, because it has to get done. Not cuz I want to do the thing, but it's just gotta get done. This is a great leap into what you're currently doing as a Chief of Staff. For first time listeners to Secret Ops, can you just explain what a Chief of Staff is within a business and and what they do? And then let's go into what your day-to-day looks like.

John (00:06:43) - The Chief of Staff really reports to one or more principals, and in my case I report the CEO and the CTO, which are our two co-founders. Essentially, my role is a catchall generalist that amplifies what the CEO and the CTO want to be done. So a lot of cases I'll be doing work that they might not have the time for or they might not have the capacity for or just not the skillset. So that can be anything from HR functions to marketing to operations and logistics to, hey, something broke or something in our documentation is wrong. Can you dig in further and find out, looking into the financials of maybe our numbers are off, can you dig into more, really just being that catch-all firefighter that either sets and scales or goes in and fixes.

Ariana (00:07:31) - This is a good moment to ask you. Do you think that on a day-to-day basis you're approaching operations from a problem-first mentality? Or are you approaching it from an opportunity-first mentality or is it a combination of the two?

John (00:07:47) - I think it's a combination of the two. It also depends on what is actually happening within the business at that time. Depending on the industry and depending on the team size, there's gonna be ebbs and flows with everything. So whether or not you're launching a new product or maybe you have some downtime, maybe there's some redesign or you're waiting on new materials to come in, there are ebbs and flows of it. But I would say overall you're mostly looking at an opportunity standpoint where in this quarter we want to achieve A, B, C, next quarter we want to achieve X, Y, Z. And then in that process you put out fires and problems that arise.

Ariana (00:08:21) - That makes sense. Every quarter, every month can look very different and so sometimes you have to put that problem-first hat on right away, but sometimes it has to be opportunity first cuz you need to look at solving a problem that maybe never existed or trying to do something that no one's ever done before. And then it becomes a very opportunity first, mentality. This gets to the part that I am really excited to talk to you about because I feel like listeners might learn how automation works, how the supply chain works in a different way by talking about what you're currently doing, at the company that you work at. So can you just walk through what Four Growers does and then what you oversee as a part of that process?

John (00:09:08) - Four Growers is an industrial automation company. At our flagship product is a robotic harvester for greenhouses. So if you're familiar at all with commercial greenhouses and we're talking around 30 to 40 acres under glass, we build robots that pick fruits and vegetables and we're starting in the tomato market. So if you loose pick snacking tomatoes you find in your local grocery store, that is what we're targeting first. And then we are kind of experimenting with other fruits and vegetables, but in terms of rollout, in terms of first product, we're manufacturing and assembling that tomato harvester and sending it out to our clients.

Ariana (00:09:44) - Whoa. Okay. So it's really cool, we, we talked about this, but I'm imagining, cutting a tomato the other day and I'm just imagining all of the engineering, all of the work, all of the operational support to go into cutting this tomato. I know that sounds like so hilarious and weird, but there's so much thought that is going behind the scenes to get that to be possible. So in this initial rollout, how does operations factor into the work?

John (00:10:14) - Operations really comes into play because you have to look at the entire product cycle and also customer success and delivery. So what I like to think of as a really roadmap for it is you have to look 12 to 18 months ahead. Meaning not only is their R&D process of actually creating the robot itself, which started in 2018, so many years before I joined the company, and we're only now to the point where we can start manufacturing and assembling these units at a larger scale and sending them out. So from that point, it's really three different parts. The first stage is the design, testing materials, ordering, and then in the manufacturing and assembly. And then where I come in is once the unit is complete, I come in for the product creating and shipping for successful customer delivery. And I also play into part into stage three, which is after sales service monitoring and potentially repair if their components need replaced or fixed or what happens at the client site with our robots.

Ariana (00:11:14) - So when, wow, so much to dive into there and I am really overly excited, so I'm trying to calm myself down here. Can we just demystify, when we say robots, all of us sort of have our own unique mind's eye image of what a robot is. What do these robots look like? How large are they? How do they work? How do they function? Can you give us a little overview of that?

John (00:11:41) - It's about half the size of a golf cart. And so for comparison's sake, it is not humanoid at all. It is not coming to take over the world. But it's mostly just a robot that fits within a greenhouse space. If again, the greenhouse space usually has different rows and heating rails and our robot just kind of rides over those rails and goes up and down the rows and able to harvest tomatoes. But for, in terms of just general size, I would say golf cart, half of a golf cart maybe in terms of weight you're looking at, the whole pack is around 2,000 to 2,500 pounds. So these are pretty big robots.

Ariana (00:12:25) - Whoa. And I'm gonna break it down just from even just like explain to me like I'm five years old kind of mentality. So the robot takes tomatoes and then what is it doing to analyze the tomatoes? Is it categorizing them? Is it counting them? Is it weighing them? What is it doing exactly?

John (00:12:46) - Yeah, so it's in two separate parts. The first part is it goes up and down the row. It has cameras on the robot and it's looking for ripe tomatoes, ones that are ready to be picked and ready, ones that are ready to be processed and based off a series of inputs, computer vision algorithms that we use. Once it detects that a tomato is ripe for picking it then extends an arm and picks them. And through that picking process, it then puts it back into a cart behind itself where we have a elevator type packing cart where it fills up each individual crates and then making sure that it has enough space to harvest an entire row, which anywhere could be, 20-ish or so crates.

Ariana (00:13:31) - Whoa. What was it like seeing it the first time in action? I gotta think that there's so much work and then you see it in action. Is it almost unbelievable that it's happening? Are you just like, well no, duh, we've done all this work. Of course it has to work, what what did that feel like?

John (00:13:47) - It was surprising at first, but then again, when I joined the company, it was our technical proof of concept. So things still needed to be fixed. You could see the vision and you could see where we were going with the product itself. But did it work as efficiently as we wanted to? Of course not. There were still more engineering needed to be done. There was more materials and components that we needed to be testing. But now if you look at some of our client sites where we actually sent these units, it's really an exciting experience where you can see, okay, here's where we were. And I remember when this was kind of for lack of a better term, pieced together testing components. And now it's a full-fledged system that actually works. It can work on a complete schedule, it doesn't have need a lot of human involvement. So it's, it's pretty exciting. But I think now to the point, I've been with the company for almost two years and I'm not desensitized to it, but it's just like, okay, let's keep going. Let's move the product forward, what does the next version look like? How many units are we producing next year? So I'm always looking ahead and seeing what can we do more?

Ariana (00:14:51) - Audience can't see, I'm just beaming over here cuz it seems so exciting to me that this is like the future that you're building, which is just really neat. Let's dive into the trifecta, cause I think this is a perfect time to translate what you are solving from an operations perspective within the world of robotics and automation. Let's start with the people side. From a people standpoint, what teams are you working with? What suppliers are you communicating with? What does the people side of your day-to-day look like?

John (00:15:23) - Yeah, so for context, our company is around 15 people and our company is really broken down into three distinct groups. So we have the hardware team, we have the software team, and we also have our field team. So as that relates to our internal team, it really comes down to helping the hardware and the software team in the beginning to get the materials and components that they need. So working with vendors, making sure that we can take deliveries at our office. And I should add that we are an in-person office. There is no remote work because it's very hard to build robots over zoom. So, you know, making sure that we, I'm coordinating with all of our teams of how many, pieces do we need, which vendors are we working with, where in the world are these vendors? Are they state based?

John (00:16:07) - Are they North American, are they in Europe? Are they in Asia? How are we getting these materials over to our office? Who's paying for it? Shipping logistics, are there any customs paperwork that we need to fill out because we are importing or are these shipping. Another thing to consider is, can we get the sales tax waived based off of the state-by-state laws? So there's that component. And then in terms of other things, working with the customer of when are they expecting their robot, what promises did we make? What legal obligations do we have? Because if we have to deliver, let's say a unit by X and Y date, well then you better believe that we have to work with our hardware and software teams of like, let's get it going. Are there delays?

John (00:16:53) - If there are delays, by how much can we make it up somewhere else? And that involves with also crating and shipping. Do I have to contact our 3PL and saying, hey, we have to delay this by one week, two weeks, etc. And then also going with our leadership team and going back to the client and telling them, unfortunately we need a few more weeks because we found this error as we were testing our units. And so it's just a whole matter of talking with different teams internally, talking with vendors externally, talking with, logistics and 3PLs, and then also at the end working with our client of how are they receiving the robot? Are they in our country? Are they outside the United States? And then dealing with the import laws of that specific country. What does that look like? Do we have a playbook for that? Who takes what costs? And really narrowing that down when you sign them on for their purchase order.

Ariana (00:17:45) - It seems like the complexities are never ending because first you gotta find the vendors, then you've gotta see where they're located, all of these locational complexities and compliance needs, right? Then once you've got the vendors, then you've gotta build and test and design and prototype, and then you've gotta work with the clients and your customers on what that looks like and, and refining that over time. And with technology moving so quickly, the amount of times that you're changing and iterating has gotta be constant. I can only imagine over the last couple of years how much has changed in what you can do just with, you know, machine learning, just with robotics. How do you, from a process standpoint do this? What have you built so that your brain doesn't explode with all of these different things that you're building? I'm sure listeners are just hearing all the complexities and just thinking, how do you begin to manage that? Like what are some tools that you put into place and what are some processes that you have, to help?

John (00:18:44) - I will say that anybody in operations might align with this, but I will say that you have to be an expert note taker. I cannot remember everything that is going on. I cannot remember every single step in these processes, whether that's building it or shipping it out or dealing with customers. You have to build your own playbooks, you have to build your own checklists, you have to take notes on pretty much everything because if you don't, you're gonna miss one step and then all of a sudden the country doesn't import the robot. It is stuck at the airport in maybe in Europe or Asia, and then you're just like, well, I'm in the United States. Do I hop on a plane? Wo do I call? So for the better part of it, just take everything, making sure you have all your notes and then really being synced with leadership both from the department head standpoint and also from a co-founder standpoint of you have to know what's coming down the pipeline at all times.

John (00:19:41) - It could be three months away, it could be six months away, but regardless, you even have to force the issue sometimes of saying, hey, in order to prepare better for my job and making sure we're hitting our targets, at least give me a heads up of in three months we're gonna hire five people in six months, we're gonna send out two units in two different countries. Like having that sense initially is really beneficial from my point of view, because then I can go back and say, okay, the last time we sent a unit, we did this checklist with our 3PL we're doing the same thing. Or if we're hiring five people, here's the places that we did recruiting. Here's the skillsets that we need, here's the job descriptions, here's how we define the rubrics. Or even from a standpoint of guess what, we're out of office space and we need more shop space.

John (00:20:30) - Well, okay, well how much space do we need? And what happened last time that we negotiated our lease? So going back to that and saying, here's the sticking points that we had to negotiate. Is this going to be an issue again? Does this matter anymore? And going all down through all those checklists where you still have the context of the experience you had, but at the same time you have a fail safe of all of your notes. Here's the good things that went, here's the bad things that happened. Here's the weird things that you didn't even anticipate. And you can cross-reference them every time you do this again or you scale that process up.

Ariana (00:21:07) - Can we go back to something you said, you said playbook and this sounds awesome to me and I don't know if I've named it playbook in the things that I do, but when you say developing a playbook for different parts of this, what does that look like? Is it like an index of the step-by-step process and how something was rolled out? Is it a way of working? Is it different considerations? Is it a checklist? Like what do you, when you say playbook, what does that look like and what does that mean?

John (00:21:33) - So playbook to me means creating a document or a set of documents that outline exactly step-by-step what happens in this process. Because from my perspective, I want to make it so that if I disappear or if I'm get moved to another department or another line of work, that I could have somebody come in my place, pick up the playbook and be somewhat of an expert from day one. And I need to be really detailed of it, from here's the goal, here's the steps, but also at being so granular of, you know, on this day when shipping pickup happens, the truck arrives at this time. Here's what you need in terms of forklifts, here's the paperwork you need to to give it to them. Here's once they leave, here's how you check in with your 3PL.

John (00:22:22) - Ask them for X, Y, Z...once it lands if you do air freight or you do ocean freight, once it arrives, you need to check in at this point at this time. And then check in with the client of did they get the shipment? What questions do they have? So in my eyes it's, and this isn't just for logistics and shipping, but just everything from hiring to marketing, build everything down to the finest of details to anticipate that if you were to hand this to somebody else, they could do your job.

Ariana (00:22:54) - When I work with clients that say, all right, we're gonna go by the, if I get hit by a bus rule, if I get hit by a bus, can you pick up where I left off? That's like the baseline rule that we have to play by. And it sounds like the playbook is like that, but just even more so because again, you've got so many plates that you're spinning trying to do what you do when it comes to the playbook and then the technology that you're using to support all those different parts of what you're doing, what are some technical tools that you're relying on to, to do different parts of the process?

John (00:23:30) - I think project management is by far the, the top priority for me. So for us that means using Monday, that's, there's other project management tools out there, but really being ingrained in that, in outlining each specific step. And also if you need team members to be a part of that project or part of that process, you can tag them. We also use, Slack for very day-to-day communications or even just a history of this is what we discussed, you know, quickly put it in a message, send it to each other, making sure that we can reference it later. But those are the two main points. And then you can also have like Google sheets, Google Suite, any sort of external drives that you store these playbooks or the other documentation. But I would say those are the core pieces of it. Beyond that, you might use things like Salesforce if you're doing more customer-related conversations or you wanna take notes based off of your sales process. But for us it's mostly project management, a place to store these documentations. And then for me, I live and die by my Evernote subscription and that's mostly for me just taking everything in my head and making a complete mess on a document and then going back later and then organizing it and then taking that organized thought to merge it into the playbook.

Ariana (00:24:48) - I feel like brain dumping in operations is something that we all do, but we actually never talk about. And that's why everyone thinks that we're very type A people because we present these organized things. My organized thoughts and processes always come from just a chaotic note, an Apple note that I just took furious notes on and then I translated it into something that made sense for other people. But it always starts with chaos. It sounds like you're the same way. Is is that right?

John (00:25:16) - That's correct. I'm almost to the point where I'm thinking about getting an AI assistant on Zoom calls to start recording notes, that way I can cross reference what was said. Now granted, I'm to the point where I'm a very good note taker and I could do it all manually, but just in case I forget a few things, I'm thinking about get adding that extra layer of support.

Ariana (00:25:38) - Yeah, I'm with you actually cuz it's after some point you just can't type fast enough as people are speaking, you know, I'm fast but I'm not that fast. So this gets into the inside scoop part of Secret Ops, which is where you shine light on the things that people outside of operations wouldn't necessarily know, but it's important for us to share. And the first one that I wanna jump into is what do you think people get wrong about operations? And I would love to know specifically what you think people get wrong about robotics operations or automation operations. Like what do you think people see that as and what do you think it actually comes across as?

John (00:26:22) - So I'll answer this in two parts. The first part will be a general answer to your question and then I'll dive into the robotics part. So I think overall it's not about being an expert in operations because there's a lot of different things that we're going to be dealing with. So it's not about knowing what you know, it's more about how you approach it, right? So it's about approaching learning, it's about how you make decisions, how you stay organized, because operations are one of those roles where things always change throughout your career. And as you switch from company to company, you're going to be dealing with a number of different things. But at the same time you can approach it in the same way.

Ariana (00:27:03) - That's a question I have for you actually, especially because you're dealing with such technical teams when it comes to developers or people that are developing the robotic side of what you're doing. When you came into the company, how technical were you and how has that influenced, you know, your approach to operations?

John (00:27:23) - A lot of it did come on the fly as I was working with these teams. I wouldn't say that I knew the 101 type of material for anything. So it's more or less what are you dealing with constantly, what are the teams talking about? How can you best help them? Let them ask for help and let them be specific on what they need and that's where you pick up the knowledge.

Ariana (00:27:44) - Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a ton of sense because I think I've had to accept something over the years in operations, which is I can't possibly know everything, but I can learn a lot of things and if I know what I need to learn, that makes the the end goal a lot clearer. So that makes a lot of sense. Going back to the question on what do you think people get wrong about operations, can you dive into the more automation/robotics side of it?

John (00:28:13) - I think the biggest thing they miss how much time it takes. We're not talking about, oh develop a product, release it, couple months, you're good to go, let's roll this out. We're talking 4, 5, 6, 7 plus years of R&D testing it out, testing components, getting clients signed up for pilot programs, having clients allow us to develop within their facility. Then seeing if it works, then doing wear and tear testing and then maybe after three to four years you have a prototype where you can test out and then continue to iterate off of that. And then maybe after five or six years you have a full scale product that you can really scale up and then start to deliver. The biggest thing is just time. It takes a lot of time and it doesn't really matter if you're picking tomatoes or if you're trying to automate maybe fast food or automate some other process. There's so much work that goes into each and every product that it could be up to a decade and sometimes it is where it's fully able to be rolled out.

Ariana (00:29:23) - How do you think that's changed your view of just living in the world? I know that sounds really silly, but when I worked within, you know, food supply chain, when I would go into a grocery store knowing every tiny part that went into developing a bag of popcorn, every time I looked at a product there was a whole different appreciation cuz I knew all of the effort. So knowing this part of operations and business and just society in general, how has that changed your view of how you move in the world? Like do you have a different appreciation for certain things? Are you harder on certain things because you know what goes behind it?

John (00:30:02) - I certainly have an appreciation for how much work it takes to do anything, right? So if you have a long-term vision or a long-term goal and to your point of maybe it's picking up a new product, this grocery store and you kind of look at the bag and you're like, never heard of this brand before, but in the back of my mind I could take a stab at how much work did it take to get this one bag at this one location, right? And I think for me being in robotics and automation, it really bleeds into my personal life of, oh, what are my goals for the year? How do I plan my year? Am I looking at 2024 already? Right? So big ticket items, are you buying a new car? Are you moving different apartments? Are you buying a house? Really kind of flagpole of what are the big moments throughout the year? And then work your schedule outward and build from there. And so from, it might be a little bit nerdy, but you know

John (00:30:59) - I'm looking at 12 to 24 months ahead of time in my personal life of, oh, what kind of concerts do I want to go to of what kind of trips do I want to go to? And it's really just kind of encompassed in all of this planning where at this point it's just natural, right? I don't even notice that I'm doing it, but I also just plan everything out to the T.

Ariana (00:31:20) - That is, that's hysterical because I think I've, I've gone in the opposite direction as I've stayed in operations now outside of work, I'm like, I don't wanna plan anything I wanted to. I just wanna hire people to plan a vacation for me because it's really hard to get yourself out of that, to break that cycle mentally, but it also is a superhero skill, right? Like you can plan things. I mean, if you're doing robotics and if you're dealing with all these different vendors in all these different locations, you know, planning a concert is like no big deal. You know, like figuring that out is like...butter. So what do you think is the hardest part of operations and what you do? What's the part when you start doing it? You're just like, oh God, this again?

John (00:32:05) - I would just say not in a negative way, but learning how to learn, and learning how to learn fast, especially when it comes to documentation or forms or opportunities you can't miss out on, for instance, if you fill out this form in the wrong way and it could have ripple effects of did you ship your product on time, did it cross a border, did it get accepted by your client? It could be one small box in one small form, but that puts me on agile bit where I'm not groaning about it, but I'm double checking and triple checking to making sure that is this right. And if I don't know that it's right, I'm getting somebody on the phone..can you review this? Are there people that I can talk to? Can I talk to the client? Do they have a shipping and logistics department or do they have something that I can reference if it's a country-based thing, is there an economic development agency that I can get on the phone and saying, here's how I'm approaching this. Tell me that I'm wrong. Right? Kind of defend against all the missteps.

Ariana (00:33:08) - Wow, that is so true and I never thought about that, especially when I look at even medical forms now, it’s the thing I least like doing, but it's so important. And now I read every single line, every single word because it just is instilled because if you don't catch it up front, man, it comes to bite you in the butt later. A hundred percent. That's a very good point. Now, if we were to flip it, because let's talk about all the happy things we love. What do you think is your greatest joy in operations? What draws you to it?

John (00:33:41) - Being able to look at the entire company and have a hand print on pretty much each department. Granted, I did mention that I don't deal with product outright, but at the same time I'm dealing with the finances, I'm dealing with HR, I'm dealing with marketing and PR, I'm dealing with the operations logistics. So I get to see the entire health of the company in one big swoop. And I pretty much have almost all the keys to kingdom that if I needed to look something up or if I needed to verify something, I could do my own analysis. Whether or not it's project related I'm just curious about something, I can go in quickly check it or build something out for my, my own curiosity and then see how everything is moving over a span of a quarter, a month, a quarter a year and so forth.

Ariana (00:34:30) - Being in operations is, is like a curious person's dream because you do have the ability to access and understand and learn all these new things. And even though sometimes it is daunting and can get tiring, it's also, man, the things I've learned just because I've been thrown into a situation or because I have to deal with a problem, it's hard to even describe how appreciative I am of that. So it's a good reminder. Do you think if someone were to transition into operations, what would you recommend them doing? How would you recommend them starting? Especially because you had a journey as a designer, as an entrepreneur, how would you recommend people getting into operations if they were interested?

John (00:35:13) - I would say whether it's your current work environment or maybe some volunteer work, just raise your hand and volunteer for things that you have, nothing about, right? So maybe they're looking for extra support or maybe they're looking for a team member on this one-off project. Raise your hand and get involved because I think for those who are really interested in operations, they're going to go through the time of how do you deal with things you don't know about? How do you learn quickly? How do you make decisions on the limited information that you do have, right? And so getting in those reps of, I don't know anything about this, I'm gonna learn about it, I'm gonna make decisions based off our team, or I'm gonna make pretty impactful decisions that may not be reversible, right? Getting in those things, over and over again will hopefully broaden the horizon for anyone who wants to be in operations and saying, is this really for me? Do I see my career going in this direction? Because if you really like it and you really like dealing with the chaos and the mystery of it all, well then operations could be for you.

Ariana (00:36:18) - Mm, that's a great point. You can definitely dip your toe into the operations world just by volunteering to help or support or get involved in a project and you don't have to go all in if you aren't totally sure and probably that's not the right way to do it for most people. I think I accidentally fell into operations cuz again, I was just trying to solve problems and then it just made sense because I just kept want trying to solve problems. Then somebody said like, this is a job in a business, this is operations, do you wanna do this? But you're totally right, you don't have to go all in right away. You can try it out and that's probably the better route for most people. I found that the same thing, when I was mentoring people is that they thought they wanted to get into data analytics and so we would get them a project so they could try that out and some people really got excited and thrived and other people weren't into it.

Ariana (00:37:11) - And that's a great way to test before you buy, I guess, try out the thing before you do do the thing full-time. So this is a new segment that I wanted to try, which is giving a bit of bonus content. And because you are in such a particular niche of operations, that is, I would say really unique. I would love to learn your opinion on where you think operations is moving towards. So obviously it evolves, it’s different between companies and industries, but in your realm, how do you see it changing over the next like one to five years?

John (00:37:52) - I'm not saying this just because I'm in robotics and automation in general, but I will say from a generalized operation point of view, regardless of industry, regardless of company size, you're going to see how much of the operations process can be automated from a back office point of view, right? So if you're dealing with finances, if you're dealing with HR, if you're dealing with marketing, you're going to see maybe a Chief Automation Officer be added to companies. You might see automation titles be added into the company where the, the whole goal is to make sure the company smoothly operates without any intervention. Or maybe you might think of it as if the company normally requires 10 people to operate, can you do it in eight? Can you do it in five? Can you do it in three? Like what are the ramifications if you could make sure that an, an entire or multiple departments ran with just three people at the helm versus 10 or versus 20. So I think you're gonna see that that almost that squeeze of how much efficiency can we get or what does that look like from a software standpoint? What does that look like from a cost standpoint? Like really getting every inch or every drop that we can on the automation side of operations.

Ariana (00:39:11) - I would agree, and I think that a lot of people are scared of that and I understand why. You know, ultimately there, if you automate, there's going to be an issue with jobs, right? That you will not need to do certain jobs. I will say though, the amount of times I come into a business and people are doing manual things that can be easily automated, it's every business and it's, it's not like the really refined things. It, it's just the basic things that need to be streamlined. And I will say employees don't enjoy doing those things, like team members don't like doing them. That's always one of the things I try to approach it is like, all right, let's automate the really annoying parts of your job that can be automated so that you can do the things that require strategic thinking so that it requires, person-to-person communication that requires the skillsets that we all enjoy more than just, sending the email, checking the box, creating the calendar invite. I see both sides and I'm, I'm a hundred percent aligned with you on that, it's gonna be quite interesting. But even, chatGPT is going to change so much in the next year, right? When we've got AI powered answers, any questions that we have, you can Google and have a response that's more thoughtful and that's just gonna change everything. It already is which I'm actually excited for. I'm not scared of it. Are you scared at all of the that change?

John (00:40:42) - No, I think if you go into it with an open mind and really seeing the possibilities, you have to embrace whatever's coming because it's going to arrive whether you like it or not. And it's far better to be informed and really know the details of how it might change your industry, how it might change your company. I think as we're seeing all the tech layoffs and the percentage cuts in these companies, you're seeing people open the Pandora's box of how many people do we actually need to run this company across all departments? Like is there an efficiency gap here? Are we a little bit bloated? And so whether it becomes chatGPT or another resource that gets rolled out, you're just gonna see that more and more of how can we start with a really basics of things, completely write that out of people's day-to-day job and then move upwards. It will reshuffle the market a little bit in terms of jobs and the economy, but I think there's a point at the end where it works out for everyone. You just have to stay on top of it and know what the ramifications are of each rollout could be.

Ariana (00:41:52) - Yeah, and I think people got a little in 2020 when obviously there were a ton of layoffs, because of Covid, we saw something happen where businesses cut their labor and they just expected the people to do more work. And what did we see? Like we saw burnout, we saw, discontent, we saw employee retention issues. I mean that's, that's obviously, that was reacting very extreme to an extreme situation. And I feel like that is a bit of the fear that's going into the automation side of things, but I see it as you're not gonna be overworking people. You're gonna be working people in a way that is more intelligent than how they're currently being used. And hopefully out of that they'll actually enjoy their work more. So it's not gonna be like less people, more work, it's gonna be less people, more automated work streams for more employee contentment and happiness. That's my opinion. If done right, of course people will do it wrong, and they'll do it in all the wrong ways. But I think ultimately that is the north star that hopefully we can get to within operations.

John (00:43:02) - You also have to consider that time is of a factor here. It's not gonna come tomorrow, it's not gonna be next year. These things take time. And yes, in my world in robotics, it takes five to 10 years and with a lot of these tools, as you automate it, it's gonna take multiple years as well. So it's not like it's gonna show up at your front door tomorrow. Yeah, you might be able to get some warning that it is coming down the line, but you really have to take into consideration how much time and effort it takes. Because even if you get a basic, whether that's software or product, they're gonna make mistakes. You're gonna, you're gonna need updates, there's gonna be some tweaks needed. So it's not like it's all gonna happen tomorrow.

Ariana (00:43:43) - Yep. But that is also, that also means there's, there's no excuse. Everybody should be thinking about that today and looking at that and understanding that, cuz it won't just come up tomorrow, just like in the last 10 years we saw how much change on the web, on the internet, the tools that we have access to, we've seen a version of that. Now we just have to prepare for the next wave of what that looks like. So let's go into some rapid fire questions to learn more about you, the human behind the operations automation, robotics machine. So first things first, what is the favorite part of your day?

John (00:44:19) - I would say the morning. I am a morning person. I'm not the type of person that throws their alarm across the room and breaks it. I do like approaching the day. It’s brand new. Hopefully I got a good night's sleep ahead of time. But you know, the possibilities of that day really excite me.

Ariana (00:44:37) - What book are you currently reading?

John (00:44:39) - I just picked up a book called Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. She was the former COO of Stripe and so it's more of a business book, HR type of reading. But I really love business books and someone suggested that to me.

Ariana (00:44:54) - What is the best purchase under $50 that you've made?

John (00:44:58) - That's a really good question. Under $50, I think it's more or less just smaller tools I use every day. So I know it's a little bit over $50, but things like Evernote or things like Spotify that really excites me and I use those tools every day. From an actual tool standpoint, I dunno, probably my gym membership, although that's monthly.

Ariana (00:45:21) - That's great. That's good. Healthy mind, I love that. Healthy body. All good things. What is your favorite quote?

John (00:45:31) - You know, I'm not much of a quote person, so I don't think that I have a standard quote or things I always put up on my wall. But I will say one of the things I do live by, whether it's a quote or you consider it a more of a mantra, is align, achieve and let go. Meaning align all your things, achieve what you want to, and then once you get that win, let it go.

Ariana (00:45:55) - Hmm. I love that. I'm gonna take that one. What is the most important lesson you've learned?

John (00:46:01) - I would say things aren't as scary or as intense as you think they are. And no matter what you're gonna get through it. So for me, it's, you know, dealing with whatever gets thrown your way, break it down into small chunks, whether that's a project, whether maybe you get a curve ball in your life with your health, or maybe a family member or a friend be ready for those, but they're not as scary and it's not as intense as in stress related as you might think. Take it in stride.

Ariana (00:46:31) - Yeah, when you look back, you will be amazed at the things that we can do. Lastly, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

John (00:46:39) - You know, it's funny when you, if you were to ask me that growing up, I always wanted to be an architect, right? Designing buildings, designing the way people live inside their homes and whatnot these days, beyond the sports athlete type of typical answer that, you'd love to play right field for your favorite baseball team or whatnot. I just want to be somebody that stays in business, that owns businesses that really scales businesses because I love the work that I do. And so I'm kind of on my way there. I mean, I as an operations person, I could certainly scale it up so to speak, but, I'm pretty happy where I am and they just wanna continue that going forward.

Ariana (00:47:22) - Lastly, John, if people are listening to you and they're interested by all the things that you're talking about, where can they find you?

John (00:47:28) - I would say there's two places mainly to check over. The one would be LinkedIn. You could just search my name. I don't think there's too many people with my last name, so it makes it a little bit easier. But also you can check my website out, which is my name, my first and last name together, JohnQualye.co. You could take that and visit to see what kind of projects I've been up to.

Ariana (00:47:48) - Fantastic. John, thank you so much for your generosity in sharing your world and giving us a peek into everything that you and the team are building. I appreciate it so, so much. And I appreciate you listeners of Secret Ops. Please remember to follow us wherever you find your podcast and check us out at secre-tops.com. We'll see you next time.