With Gratitude

[00:01]  Narrator

What happens when the most valuable thing AI gives a consulting firm isn’t speed, but the freedom to choose what to do next?

In this episode of With Gratitude, Stephanie Hogen and Allen Debes sit down with Mark Orttung, CEO of Projectworks. You’ll hear why growth quietly solves most of the problems inside a professional services firm, why Mark believes software in his category has been solving the less important half of the problem, and what happened when Projectworks looked across 700-plus firms and compared the ones that plan the resourcing two months out and the ones that don’t.

Mark also discusses the inside cats and outside cats framing, his honest answer for firms worried that agents will hollow out junior roles, and the one Claude skill he’d hand a consulting leader who wants to start small next week.

Whether you run a firm, lead a delivery organization, or sit on a client project trying to figure out where AI actually belongs, this conversation offers a practical look at where the recovered hours should go. Let’s jump in.

[01:11]  Stephanie Hogen

The Vervint podcast. Today, live with you all, we’re continuing our special series, With Gratitude: Where Humans and AI Take Us Next. At Vervint, we believe the best technology doesn’t just work — it creates lasting human gratitude for the people who use it, the teams who build it, and the customers they serve.

I’m your host, Stephanie Hogen, Chief Consulting Officer, part of Koniag Tech, joined by my co-host and our CEO, Allen Debes. And today we are joined by Mark Orttung, the CEO of Projectworks. Mark has spent his career in and around consulting, building and scaling professional services and software firms, most recently growing Nexient from a couple hundred people to well over a thousand before its acquisition by NTT Data. Today he leads Projectworks, an AI-powered growth platform built for consulting firms.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us. We’re glad to have you here.

[02:01]  Mark Orttung

Thank you for having me.

[02:03]  Allen Debes

Right on, Mark. Thanks for being with us. It’s awesome to spend the time today. And the idea of this With Gratitude or Lasting Gratitude podcast series and the book we came up with was born of a silly thing, which is — and I think I shared the story with you, Mark — I was interacting with Claude one day, the chosen AI platform for us, and I found myself spontaneously thanking Claude, which I thought was a brand new thing. I never remember thanking ERP or CRM. I don’t remember doing that. And so it spawned this idea that the kind of technology we’re faced with now can create lasting gratitude, and we’re gonna need that gratitude to open up brain space to be able to absorb the new future that we’re faced with, right?

But the fact that you and I worked together for four and a half years of our career — I learned a lot from you over those years, and I’m of course grateful for that, and I’ve shared that a bunch over our time together. But it occurred to me in preparing for this session with you that you’ve got an entire arc of your career between services and product, services, product, services, product, that is very powerful and unique and has its own definition of gratitude underneath it, I’m sure.

And so we’d love to just hear a little bit more about your background, if you could share with our audience. Stephanie and I know it very well, but sharing with our audience a bit more about your background, the arc of your career, would be a great place to start, if you don’t mind.

[03:34]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, happy to. Yeah, as you said, I’ve bounced back and forth between services and software products in kind of a weird way. I don’t know too many other people that have done that. Starting with Accenture back in the late ’80s, and I worked on all kinds of different stuff there, including their methodology. I did work at an AI lab for a couple of years, ’89 through ’91, and then helped them do some startups in Palo Alto. So kind of a weird career for Accenture, but it was a fun one. The last two years were a startup that gave me the bug to go do a real startup. I learned that Accenture was a great consulting firm, not very great at venture.

So then I went and I did a series of four product, venture-backed product companies. I was very lucky to work with some really great companies: Genesys, which is still today a leader in call center, contact center technology; GetThere, which was a leader at the time in basically corporate travel booking — we were one of the early internet booking sites, purchased by Sabre, just actually recently purchased again by another company; one that was called Rearden Commerce, and that one didn’t really go anywhere like the others did, but that happens when you do a lot of startups. And then Bill.com, which was a great company. We had, when I joined, eight customers. When I left, we were maybe at like 20,000. I think today there are just around a half a million companies using it, which is amazing. And it’s a great piece of the economy now, actually. It’s about a little over 1% of the GDP flows through it. And one of the things I loved there was I developed a passion for working with small companies as customers. I had been in startups, but before that all my customers were Fortune 500, and just the passion and the closeness to their market and their product and their service was something I really enjoyed.

Took a bit of a turn and I went back to services. Kind of a long story how I got there, but a friend of mine, Neeraj, talked me into coming in and running what was called Systems in Motion, and we rebranded it as Nexient. Screwed it up for a few years, kind of took it in the wrong direction for a few years revenue-wise, but we luckily turned it around with a great team that you guys were a part of, and were able to grow it over a five-year period from about 34 million at the low point to about 130 million when we sold it, and just learned a ton in that journey.

After we sold it, I met the founders of Projectworks and liked them. I really liked their product. And it felt like something that I wished we had found at Nexient. We never had a good answer to this. We tried in the early days, I think, three different packages in the market. None of them really worked for us. So then we, as software nerds, were like, oh, we’ll just build it, it’ll be great. And that’s got its own challenges, right? Like you put the team on when they’re on the bench, and then you get a new client project, and you take the team and put them on the client project, and then whoever rolls up next goes on to your internal tool. And the result of that is you basically have four weeks max, like lifetime of your developers on your project, and it just doesn’t go anywhere.

Yeah, so Projectworks put together two things that I thought had absolutely nothing to do with each other: my Bill.com experience and my Nexient experience. I thought they were just unrelated things that I happened to do. And this puts together like an SMB market — sort of the go-to-market is the same — but I was effectively doing customer research for nine years at Nexient. So for me, it just felt like it would be fun. And I’m just really having fun. I think I’m happiest when I’m learning. And yeah, so it’s just, the world’s moving fast. I’m learning a ton.

[07:51]  Allen Debes

Yeah, that’s cool. And I think about that, the arc of all that, and some of it’s happenstance, luck and timing. And then there’s this part of you that I happen to think I understand, which is this durability of purpose, the durability of conviction and vision, that it doesn’t just sort of happen when you come out of grad school or whatever, that has to be built over time, right? So I’m wondering for you if there were moments where conviction and vision really came to the forefront for you across that arc and where it really mattered to get through a tough moment or a tough time.

[08:33]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, I think there’ve been a number of moments. I think my first, when I got into Genesys, when my first, what I call real startup, just seeing what they had created. They had the two founders, Greg and Alec, had basically funded it themselves for six years just because they had this conviction that they could create something from nothing. I joined the day before — I can’t take a lot of credit for the IPO — but just seeing these guys who had spent seven years, they had mortgaged their houses to make payroll, they had done all sorts of crazy things to get this company to go and then take it public, was just amazing to see that arc. And so I think that inspired me of what’s possible out there.

And then just, yeah, I think at GetThere, we were one of two leaders in corporate travel, and one of the product managers and I, Sean, came up with this idea that we could cut out the distribution layer, which was both the systems like Sabre and the credit cards. So we had customers like Chevron and Nike, and they were buying plane tickets from like United and other giant travel suppliers to the order of like 20 or 30 million a month. And they were paying probably 5 or 6% in all these distribution fees. And we just came up with this idea: why don’t we just connect them directly? We’ll charge them a dollar for every ticket. We’ll make more than we make now, and they’re going to save like 5% on their monthly travel, and we’ll just have the airline invoice them.

So we brought the idea to our executive team. They’re like, yeah, great idea, let’s go try it. Within maybe three or four weeks, we had about, I don’t know, 12 or 14 of the major travel suppliers — air, car, and hotel — signed up to do a press release with us, and we just did this and announced it. What I didn’t know was at the time we were negotiating, our executive team was negotiating with Sabre to sell the company. And so this was basically the threat: if you don’t buy us, we’re going to disrupt you. But anyway, that was the first time we went from idea to something taking shape in a few weeks. And had we not been bought by Sabre, I think we would have created a whole new platform.

Yeah, so different moments, I think, kind of crystallized that you can have this — I think there’s like a, you need to have a very long-term view of what you’re trying to do, and then a very short-term tactical, like you just got to keep marching through the steps, and there’s a million of them and half of them don’t work, and you go backwards and forwards, but you got to keep the long-term in view. Yeah.

[11:22]  Allen Debes

Yeah, that’s certainly well said, and it creates a stamina that you have to stick with things, I think seven, eight, nine years, where other people might give up sooner. And that’s something I certainly noticed. Stephanie, do you have any questions for this part of it?

[11:38]  Stephanie Hogen

I did, yes. So Mark, you had said when we were chatting in the prep call that when the firm is growing, most problems go away. And sort of the question I started with is: does growth fix those problems, or why does growth fix those problems? So you’re going to answer either one of those questions, because I don’t know that they’re the same answer. But curious if you could say a little bit about that as we head into our second segment of the podcast.

[12:09]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, I think if you’re doing things well, you get these really talented, ambitious people in your services firm. And they all want to learn, they want to take on more responsibility, they want to be promoted, they want to lead teams. And if you’re growing, you’re constantly creating new roles for them to move into. And so they’re just challenged, they’re happy. And so your culture is good.

There’s also like a financial perspective, which — we had every year we would hire new college grads and give everybody a raise. So the overall workforce kept about the same cost. If you stop growing, you give everybody a raise, but you don’t have a new first-year class. Your whole average cost just went up by whatever percent you gave everybody a raise. So now you’re like, should I give everybody a raise? Because you can’t really afford it. So all these little details start to happen, and there’s probably like 20 of them.

So if you can just keep growing, you can keep hiring people, you can keep promoting people, you can keep giving your team better compensation. And it just is sort of magical. And if you are flat, or especially if you’re shrinking, all these things add to your problem, right? You just like, nobody’s happy, you can’t compensate them correctly, you can’t promote them. It’s just, yeah. So it’s, I don’t know if I answered your question, but like it really, like all those like tactical things that keep your team happy and motivated and engaged happen naturally if you’re growing, and they just break otherwise.

[13:58]  Allen Debes

Yeah, it’s harder. Hitting the reset button and getting back to it is a challenge. You mentioned that at Nexient it went backwards for a while. Any lessons learned from that that helped bounce out of it?

[14:15]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, it took a long time. And stick with it, I guess.

[14:20]  Allen Debes

Yeah, right, that’s a good point.

[14:23]  Mark Orttung

I mean, there were a few things, I guess. We never stopped experimenting along the way as we were trending down. But I think as we got near the end, I think the one thing that stood out was we went out and hired three fairly senior go-to-market people that we called client partners at the time. So we were shrinking. My board was all over me to do a bunch of layoffs, which I didn’t want to do. And the last thing that would make sense is go spend money on three expensive people. But I felt like the only way to solve the problem was by growing, and the only way we were going to grow was by getting some talented people in that could help us do that.

So kind of near the bottom, we hired these three expensive client partners, which was new for us, and they helped us turn it around. So that like got one quarter to be like slightly bigger than the last, and then the next one was a little bit bigger, and then it really started to go. Yeah, so you got to invest even as you’re like nearing hitting the ground.

[15:30]  Allen Debes

Yeah, right on. And I think my ad hoc question there took Stephanie off track a little bit there to get us to the next segment. Back to you, Stephanie. Please take it.

[15:42]  Stephanie Hogen

It’s okay. I asked that question. You asked if you answered it correctly, and you did. I wanted that to be a little bit of an appetizer for us into giving us a quick overview of what Projectworks is, so that we can start setting up why you’re creating work that’s making people grateful.

[16:00]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, so we are a platform to run your firm, and it’s everything from proposals to payments. So the idea is we help you sell work, we help you get the contract, we help you do the project financials, plan out who’s going to work on it, some of the tactical stuff like time cards, expenses that then become the source of truth for invoicing. And then we sync it all back to QuickBooks or Intacct or Xero, whatever your accounting system is. That’s kind of at the core. There’s a lot more detail to it than that, but we can get into it a little bit more as we go.

[16:39]  Stephanie Hogen

Thanks. So most applications in this category sell for efficiency, but as we had talked about before, you’re selling for growth. Can you walk us through why you’re operating on that level and growing faster?

[16:55]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, partly it’s my own, like at Nexient as the leader, I spent 90% of my time selling, trying to grow the firm. And I looked at our product and the whole category when I arrived and sort of said, we’re at best solving half the problem, and it might be the less important half. I think we really need to help these firms grow and marry that up with operations. And the two, I’ve learned actually since then that the two are even more intertwined than I realized. The operations do help you grow, and the growth can help you operate better, done well. And so it just felt like to solve the problem, we needed to help firms sell and get contracts done and kind of automate that front end as well. Yeah. So kind of my own self-interest, I guess, from when I sat in the chair.

[17:50]  Stephanie Hogen

For your own, that you’ve experienced the pain enough in your career that you had some personal interests.

[17:56]  Mark Orttung

Absolutely.

[17:58]  Allen Debes

Yeah, that’s awesome, and agreed. And I also am grateful for the plug that you as the CEO spend 90% of your time out selling. I think that’s an obligation that we all have as executives of these businesses, to be in the market, right? And painting that picture for our employees as well, on what that looks like and staying focused. That’s awesome to hear you’re still doing that, ’cause that was our model before too, right?

When it comes to a growth-focused software value-add firm like Projectworks and so on, it makes me want to ask you, back to the 90% point: if there were things at Nexient when you were running a services business that you could offload to an agent in a heartbeat, what would it be? What would have made your, in an AI world back then, what would have made your life 10X easier that you just would have had an agent do so you didn’t have to?

[18:55]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, I think the core one, and it’s actually what brought me to Projectworks, because even before I joined it was a strength and we’re continuing to invest in it, is this kind of view of your team and which ones have committed contracts for which dates, and which ones do we think are gonna go, but we don’t actually have a contract in place.

I don’t know if you guys ever witnessed this, but what we would do maybe every four or five months, our controller, Biju, would go through all of our statements of work, and he would figure this out, and he would put it in a spreadsheet, each client, each team, when are they contracted, how many people. Then a week later — it would take him a week to do this, full time of a week — then a week later, it’d be out of date. He wouldn’t do it again for four or five months. We never really had a good view of who’s booked, who’s about to come back to the bench, but the client partner thinks that they’re going to get the extension, so they didn’t bother to tell us that they’re going to come back to the bench. And there was just this whole uncertainty. And as the team, 200, it’s a pretty big team, hard to manage; 500, 800, we had no idea. Pretty much flying blind.

So that was part of it. And you’ll see that’s a big area of investment for us. We have a great tool to manage it, and we’re starting there with our agents in terms of both a prompting interface to say things like, tell me who’s available, or, is anybody working over the holiday? Or, can you take this project? My least favorite thing was we’d have an optimistic start date, you’d assemble the team, and then the client would move the start date two weeks later, and so your team would just sit there on the bench for two weeks ’cause you don’t wanna disassemble the team. So getting that lined up is really important, but also like our agentic interface now, you can just type into it, move the team back a week, or move the team back three weeks, and all of those dependencies all get moved. So it’s getting easier and easier. We’re automating that week that Biju used to have to spend, and I’m sure he hated, to be honest.

[21:04]  Allen Debes

Right, right. Yeah, I think Stephanie feels that pain viscerally, right? Maybe. I was just guessing. Yeah, right.

[21:16]  Stephanie Hogen

We don’t have many people.

[21:17]  Allen Debes

It’s true. It’s still hard, right? It’s still hard for sure.

So when we think about what might be coming next, which is giving structural time back, what seems to be true across all segments or sectors is that the basic thing that AI can do is give us time back. Constantly hearing about healthcare professionals, my own daughter, who’s a speech pathologist, getting mountains of time back from note-taking and drafts of improvement plans for the child that needs a program to improve their speech, right? So it just spits out something that then she can edit and improve, and all of a sudden she can go like work out or something instead of write notes for weeks and days at a time. That seems to be kind of everywhere.

And in your world, you’re making the case, Projectworks is making the case, that there’s also a lot of time that we can be given back to a lot of employees inside the services business. Maybe you want to say a little bit more about that?

[22:25]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, one of, so we’re releasing our MCP, which lets us kind of connect into whatever your AI platform of choice is. And so one of our first areas for that is time sheets. And one of our customers got the beta on it and went into Claude and started using that to look at their meeting notes and other things to get the data of what should be on the time sheet, and having Claude go in and fill out his time sheet for him. So it can look at, we already have the ability to pull your calendar in, but it can also look at emails, meeting notes, whatever. You can have your AI look at whatever tools you might be using, and then just make insertions into your timesheet. So ideally, and we’re getting pretty close, to where you go in and there’s like a draft of your timesheet and you just want to look at that and say, yeah, make a couple edits, and you’re done. Rather than, what did I do two weeks ago or one week ago?

And from a leader perspective, ideally the timesheets will go in every day. If you had timesheets every day, then you’d have a daily revenue estimate of like, how is the month going? But we would never have that. We were lucky to get the timesheets in at the end of the week or the end of the two-week period. So we just didn’t really know revenue until the month ended. But ideally, you’d know week one, week two, we’re on, we’re off on our plan.

[23:55]  Stephanie Hogen

We have talked in our couple of podcasts and in our book, we talk about that gratitude is relational. If you are creating actual time in people’s days, what type of a mood is that creating inside of your workforce? How is that changing things for your customers?

[24:12]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, I mean, you just see them talk about a couple of different things. One, just the joy of having the time back to do either, you know, engage with your family, your community, go get a workout in or go learn something new, all of that. Like we hear that.

I also hear people talk about not only did it save us time, but we didn’t understand until we did it that it was going to kind of decentralize the information in the firm, and people, everybody has more information about what’s happening and they start making better decisions. They start understanding whether the client project is on track earlier, like where it’s off track, all these things sort of get spread around to more people. And I always believe that if you get people closer to the problem to have better data, they’re gonna make better decisions. And so that begins to happen as well. And that gets a lot of gratitude, because they really understand what’s happening better and will make better decisions in real time. So that’s kind of two layers to it.

[25:17]  Stephanie Hogen

So when you’re designing new features or what’s going to come out next, are you designing to the feeling, or are you designing to solving for more reduction, like for efficiency, for reduction of time?

[25:30]  Mark Orttung

I think I would say historically we were about efficiency. I do think AI changes it, and it does move much more towards delight and things that people will have gratitude about, because it feels almost magical. It really can take these things away from you that just nobody wants to spend time on.

[25:51]  Stephanie Hogen

Like I told you, I’m waiting for AI to do my laundry and it has been unsuccessful thus far. I would be very grateful. That would be awesome. As a busy mom with a job, I would love AI to do my laundry. If you can make that happen, Mark, I’ll be here.

[26:13]  Allen Debes

My gosh, that’s great. So given the fact that you’ve been in services all the way back to the beginning and now, and advice for us in the services business or any of our consultants that might be listening: if a consultant got five hours back in a week structurally, what would you want? I certainly have my thoughts on this, but what would you want your consultants doing, knowing that high performers are going to work more than 40 hours a week and they’re going to contribute, right? Where would you imagine or want that contribution to go?

[26:50]  Mark Orttung

I would put it all towards learning. There’s so many new tools and so many ways to apply them to make your internal processes, your client processes, what’s happening on your project, to make that better. And literally every week there’s something new, that there’s like a learning curve to all of it. So if you could have five hours a week to just really dig into how to apply agents to this new process, or how to get my work groups to work together across an agentic flow, I think it would be amazing. Right. And you need the time. I was talking to somebody and she was like, if only I had time to learn all these time-saving things that are being put in front of me. Right. Like, there is a learning curve to it. So I would put it into that, and I think we’ll keep paying back.

[27:38]  Allen Debes

Yeah, I agree. You know, for the last segment here before we open it up to questions, perhaps in the audience, you and I have spoken a bit about, and there’s a lot out there about SaaS apocalypse, and or maybe not, and something in between, and systems of record versus systems that add value on top of those systems of record. And I wonder what your perspective is on that for Projectworks, and for just in general, this notion that SaaS software is suddenly just going to die, which I don’t believe, but I would love to get your take on it.

[28:16]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, I agree with you. It’s not going to die. I think that, so if you think about a system of record, maybe one way to bring that to life is to think about the lifespan of a consulting project. So you’ve got what you proposed to the client, then some negotiation happens and you’ve got what actually sold, which is usually different. And underneath each of these, there’s sort of like a team and a budget and a timeframe, right? And it keeps getting tweaked. So you have what you proposed, what you sold. Then you go deliver the work. It always changes when you deliver it from what you thought it was gonna be. Then you send your invoice. You may decide before you invoice to write off some things, like we had a junior person here that was learning, so we’re not gonna bill for that, whatever it might be. And then the client might or might not pay your full invoice depending on how happy they are with the work.

So you have these five layers. And I think having that record of each project around how you proposed it, sold it, delivered it, and got paid for it is just such valuable data that it needs to live somewhere. It’s also very unique to the industry, so it’s not gonna just be something you can keep in spreadsheets and have that be available to AI in a really meaningful way. So that has to be there.

And then you need, so that’s the system of record piece, the system of action is like, please do my job for me, as many pieces as possible. Do my time card, help me with resource planning, point out problems in my project that we’re going to miss the budget. And those should all feed the system of record data. So they kind of, to me, they’re intertwined. And then all of it should fit through an MCP or something like it into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, whatever tool you’re using.

Yeah, so all of that, I think the winner will have all of those pieces. And so there are players like us whose background is the system of record and we’re rapidly adding the system of action. There are others who are starting with the system of action, and maybe they’re vibe coding the whole thing. And if you believe their posts, they’re going to be done in a week and they’ll have all this stuff in place. I don’t personally believe that, having tried it. But yeah, I think it’s a race to get all of those pieces in place and as tightly integrated together as possible. So yeah.

[30:39]  Allen Debes

That’s a great answer.

[30:42]  Stephanie Hogen

Thanks, Mark. Yeah, so the three of us are maybe gluttons for punishment because we’ve all been in the services industry for long parts of our career. But one of the ideas that we talked about was this notion of indoor cats and outdoor cats. And that’s why we titled this podcast More Outside Cats. Outside cats are really client-facing, out creating value, whereas house cats are inside and only doing admin work.

And so my question is, and you were getting to this a little bit, and so I’d like you to go a little bit deeper, is you’re building agents for a very specific audience with maybe unglamorous jobs: submitting time cards, doing resource plans, changing the start date and having it automagically — Allen really likes the words I make up. That’s his favorite thing about me, I think. But automagically does the stuff for you. Why go bespoke and intentional instead of one big assistant that can apply sort of across the firm, not just inside of your PSA?

[31:48]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, I do think when you dig into the back office tasks, the house cat or the inside cat tasks, they are pretty unique and they’re really complicated for what ought to be a very simple business. It’s charged by the hour, charged for the project. Consultants have made it very complicated, all the different ways that they want to analyze it and look at it and optimize it. And I never cease to be amazed when I talk to prospects and customers, the different ways they want to slice it. We’ve done this for 750-plus companies, and every time I talk to prospects, I learn something new about a different way they want to slice it and dice it. So I think that our vertical focus on the house cats inside of consulting firms is needed because it’s so complex.

So one agent across the inside cats works really well. I don’t know that that agent would be any good at helping with the outside work. And if you look across our customers, they do all kinds of really cool things. We’ve got architecture firms that are building and maintaining UNESCO World Heritage sites. We’ve got engineering firms putting up power grids. We’ve got just all these different layers of expertise. And I don’t think there’s one agent that would work across all the outside cat work that our teams do, other than maybe you could argue Anthropic and OpenAI and Google are building the frontier model, maybe that is the way to go there. But I think for what we do, it really does need to be bespoke, vertically focused, and tuned for the way the inside cats work.

[33:33]  Stephanie Hogen

Thank you.

[33:34]  Allen Debes

Yeah, that’s well said. Your answer earlier about spending that extra hour, five hours, out learning something new. I would love to see all of that be learning out in the market with our customers, alongside our customers, adding value with the learning, and that combination of striving to and desiring to make the inside work less complicated so that all the complexity and all the hard work can be in that outside alley cat kind of work with the customers. And that’s how we build the business, and that’s how the culture is focused outside the four walls of the company, if at all possible. And then we have delighted clients who want to keep buying from us, which is also amazing when that happens.

So I mean, I think what you’re talking about there is finding a powerful way to create more capacity through the tools you’re bringing to market and others bringing to market to enable that. And that goes all the way back to the cultural piece you mentioned much earlier on in terms of the right cultural norms for the company you’re in market, which is services firms like us. So that’s all really, really good. And that is that, in some ways, human agency, right? We want people to want to choose that as a way to spend their days, right?

[35:00]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, 100%.

[35:01]  Allen Debes

Yeah, right on. So Stephanie, back to you. As we, are we ready for questions and answers yet?

[35:07]  Stephanie Hogen

We can wrap a little. I don’t know who said this, but I want to just leave everybody with this thought: the gift isn’t saved minutes. I think we thought in the early days, to your point, Mark, that it was efficiency, it was going to be the thing that accelerated us. But what it is, is it enables us to take control of what we do next. So it’s not, I have to do my timesheet because it’s five o’clock on Friday. It’s like, that was done. That was done hours ago. I can go to my child’s soccer game now.

So we have one more question for you, and then I do see a question came through. So if you were talking to folks like Allen and I, or folks that were leading consulting companies, what is the one thing they could do next week to prepare themselves for something like Projectworks as a platform? What’s one thing they’d need to have right if they were going to buy your product?

[36:08]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, great question. Probably just a sense of getting their data in order, but we help them do that as well. So most of the companies that come on to Projectworks come from spreadsheets and they’re kind of a mess. But we can help with that. We’ve done it hundreds of times and we have kind of an approach to doing that. So that’s one piece, is getting data ready for that.

And the other is just, I’d say, understanding their outcomes that they want to get to. For me, the best prospective customers come in and say, we want to grow by X percent next year, we want to raise our margin by Y percent, can you help us do that? And then we can walk through how putting the tools in place would actually help them get to those business outcomes. Having clarity on that, because I find that a lot of firms don’t yet have clarity on that when they come to us. So really knowing what outcome you’re trying to achieve, and then we’re likely to have a great set of tools to help you do it.

[37:16]  Stephanie Hogen

It’s funny, you said a spreadsheet. Jessica, our ERP leader, always jokes that ERP is, or that Excel spreadsheets are the best ERP tool, as a joke, because that’s what most people have.

[37:27]  Mark Orttung

It is, 100%.

[37:29]  Stephanie Hogen

We got a question from the audience, so I’ll pose it to you. For a firm nervous that AI agents will hollow out junior roles, what’s your honest answer?

[37:40]  Mark Orttung

I think there’s a role for junior people to be what I call the AI reality check. And so when you do a lot of work with AI, it can produce quite complex answers. Somebody should vet it, right? We’ve all seen these cases in the legal world where it comes up with a citation for a case that never happened. So whatever your analysis or research you’re having done by your AI, a human being should look at it and say, ballpark, is this correct? Back-of-the-envelope math, does it check out? Anything it cites, did anybody go look to see if that actually exists? Does it look legit?

So it feels like rather than the junior person used to have to do weeks and weeks of research and pull a lot of this together, now they should be the one that says, I have checked and this is all pretty legit. Like it’s like they’ve done that reality check, because you don’t want to put it in front of the client and then have it discovered that some part of it is just not right or made up. So I think that would be a great place for junior people to learn some of those basic like gut feeling. Is this right? Is it ballpark correct, or is it way off?

[39:01]  Stephanie Hogen

Thank you.

[39:02]  Allen Debes

Great answer.

[39:06]  Stephanie Hogen

If a services firm wants to start small with agents, what’s the first job you’d hand off? Laundry.

[39:18]  Mark Orttung

Yeah, the easiest way in might be to, we did a skill that I still use actually internally at Projectworks and I kind of translated it. It’s a Claude skill. I translated it for firms. I’m happy to share it, which is a contract review skill. So if you get a lot of, you know, if you’re getting new clients, there’s often these MSAs and I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate reading them. I think we had our worst one at Nexient was, I won’t name the client, but it was about 100 pages. And every time we had to look at the thing, it was just like, I don’t know, just like pulling teeth.

And so we’ve got this Claude skill that will read it. And we kind of teach it what we care about, which is usually gonna be limitation of liability, indemnification, termination rights. Like there’s a list of five or eight things that each firm probably cares the most about. And you can put in like, this is where we want, ideally our limitation of liability will be X. And then Claude can read this whole mess and come back to you with red, yellow, green. We have like sort of little red, yellow, green baked into the scale and it just says like, these are the red risks, these are the yellow ones, and these are the green ones. And yeah, for me it’s magical because I can read a paragraph about they want your liability to be this and you want it to be that and I can think about it, but I hate going through 30 pages trying to find that paragraph and understand it.

[40:50]  Allen Debes

Yeah, we should do a group therapy session on that for sure. We are aligned.

[40:56]  Stephanie Hogen

As someone who runs the delivery org, I do have a question for you that just popped into my mind, is we’ve been talking about gratitude and we’ve been talking about some of those administrative tasks. Have you been measuring, through your work or through your application or your product, is taking away some of that admin work making people more productive, not just making them happier or more grateful? What is your baseline for greater productivity?

[41:25]  Mark Orttung

I think the gold standard for productivity is revenue per employee for your billable team. And we’ve done some interesting work. We look at our aggregated data across 700-plus customers. And one thing we did is we mapped them into two groups, those that plan two months or more into the future, which is this problem I was talking about that Biju used to do, like every once in a while he’d map it out. So if you plan your resourcing two months out, or so we put those as the planners, and then people who do one month or none are the non-planners.

And the numbers are pretty staggering. The year-over-year revenue growth for the planners was just under 25% higher. The revenue per employee was 9% higher for the planners, and so they’re 9% more productive, I would argue. And the utilization was about 8% higher. So I think a lot of it comes down to those tactical, being real clear on when will this project start, when will this person roll off, and just getting all those things lined up so you don’t lose a week here, lose a week there. That changes your revenue per employee, it changes your productivity, it changes your utilization. Yeah.

So that core resource planning, it’s, you know, they call it ERP for a reason, I guess. It’s resource planning at its core. And that really does, that operational excellence drives growth in a very meaningful way. And so I kind of had a hunch about that, but when we saw the numbers, it was pretty compelling.

[43:03]  Stephanie Hogen

Thank you.

[43:04]  Allen Debes

Yeah, that’s a great question, Stephanie. And I’m always, we’re amazed how 45 minutes will fly by, right, team? So we’re at the point where we want to wrap here. And thank you very much, Mark, for your time. Stephanie, great job leading us through this and keeping me on my toes as well. Stephanie’s great at that. Apparently, laundry is important to Stephanie, Mark. I didn’t realize that until today. So that’s a—

[43:30]  Stephanie Hogen

Getting it done faster is important to me.

[43:34]  Allen Debes

Got it. So maybe one last question for you, Mark, as we finish here. If you wouldn’t mind, finish this sentence: gratitude becomes lasting when…

[43:47]  Mark Orttung

I think when people have the freedom to do the work they really enjoy the most. I think we all have, like in our jobs, there’s stuff we really enjoy, and then there’s the laundry of the job, the timesheet, the whatever it is. And so the more you have the agency to really go do those pieces you love doing, I think that will just drive lasting gratitude because you’ll like your job, you’ll like the challenge, you’ll want to come in and work on it. Yeah.

[44:19]  Allen Debes

Right on. And go home happier too. Thank you. Love that answer. Thank you again, Mark, for your time today. And thank you for the audience for being with us. And we’ll look forward to the next one next time.

[44:31]  Mark Orttung

Thank you for having me. I love the cat analogy.

[44:34]  Allen Debes

Take care. Thank you. We’ll see you. Yeah, bye-bye. Bye-bye.