[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The First Customer podcast. My name is Jay Aigner today. I'm lucky enough to be joined by Ohsri Cohen, who is a fractional CTO and co founder of a site called leaf page, up in Montreal, America's hat, as we like to say down here. how are you doing?
[00:00:42] Oshri: I'm doing fantastic, and yourself?
[00:00:45] Jay: I'm great. I'm great. you were gracious enough to give me a few minutes. I got stuck in traffic in the wonderful Philadelphia, but we're here now. So tell me my friend, where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?
[00:00:57] Oshri: Oh my gosh, yes! Yes, I, it was, I, yeah, I was born in Israel, I moved to Canada. And, and unfortunately experienced a lot of racism and whatnot, as one would expect, sad that we, one would have to expect that actually, but one would expect, and that pushed me to constantly think about how to be independent from a very young age, how to be independent, how to build my own thing, how to start my own business, how to do it all.
I had my first business at 13, then again, at 16. Then again at 25 and again now, you know, when I turned 38, I went off on my own again after, 10, non blissful years working back, working for the man, so to speak.
[00:01:41] Jay: What were some of those earlier businesses as a teenager, what did you start around
[00:01:45] Oshri: Oh my, okay, so back then, downloading,copies of games, music and whatnot, you could freely do that, you know, Napster, all of that. But many people still didn't have those kinds of computers, right, that were able to do that. So, I created a whole order form, everything, put it in every locker in my, in my high school and said, I'm like, Hey, I can get you any game you want. 20 a pop. I can get you any CD you want for any music. 10 a pop. What do you want? Right? And they would literally just fill it up and dump it in my locker, right? I would go prepare it. I would find them, exchange the money. I made thousands of dollars cash for a 16 year old. Holy moly. That
was fun.
[00:02:29] Jay: Yeah. No, that's the real entrepreneurial spirit.
[00:02:32] Oshri: Yeah.
[00:02:33] Jay: Um, so, as you got older, it sounds like you did, you ran a couple other businesses. what was the one in your twenties,
[00:02:39] Oshri: in my twenties, I launched my own custom development shop, right? Hired developers, built out software. I had a knack for finding solutions for people. You would come with me to a business problem with a business problem. I would spit out an entire solution within a few minutes. it really did not take me very long.
So I found a knack for it. and I ran that successfully for about six, five, six years. Right. the financial crash, killed me. Right. That's it. Like, Oh, all my contracts got pulled, but being the being a new entrepreneur, I did the classic mistake of not looking into my cash flow. And so I made about 2 million.
I was 25, between 25 and 23 and 28. I made that much. and I asked and I over invested in different startups that I was trying to launch all at the same time, doing it all by myself. you learn very quickly to rely on people, but classic mistakes of the first time entrepreneur. Find any entrepreneur out there who's successful now, they'll tell you, I messed up this way.
[00:03:44] Jay: right?
[00:03:44] Oshri: And so I did that and I did the sales, I did the development, I did the project management, the design, all of it with a small team of employees and it was very sad when I had to let them all go. It was very sad, but you know,
[00:04:00] Jay: You said something interesting though. talk to me about cashflow. What did you learn about cashflow as a business owner during that time?
[00:04:08] Oshri: it's more important than your mother. I mean, your mother's important. We love our mother. Cashflow is more important. it doesn't matter whether you have an invoice that's due in, you know, net 60. And it's 50, 100, 200 thousand dollars. It matters what you have in your bank account right now in order to pay people. And that also made me a little skittish because now I was dependent on emplo on My employees were dependent on me to pay them. Right? Suppliers and vendors and all of them, then they can wait. The employees, they can't wait. this is, they pay their mortgage, they pay their rent and so on and so forth.
And I told myself that after my, my, after I was closing the business, right? my next business would be entirely run with contractors. I would pay them well. I would get people at the top of their game. That's fine. I'd rather make less money, less profit, but. More impactful work. And because I didn't want that problem to be to, to happen again. But, you know, who knows if I'm successful and money's coming in and cash flow's not an issue. Okay. It's not a problem. But consulting is a feast of famine, right?
[00:05:19] Jay: Yes, it is.
[00:05:20] Oshri: there's nothing in between.
[00:05:21] Jay: There's nothing in between. and you're typically your only salesman, right? Other than your previous clients that you did well for, those are your other set of salesmen as a consultant. But,
[00:05:31] Oshri: Yes. I was the salesman, I was the ops, I was the account manager, I was the technical lead. I was everything. And I still am right now, everything.
[00:05:40] Jay: so you went back in to the corporate world,
you know, I don't know how much we need to dig into that, but what I'm more curious about is the end of that and you coming back into the consulting world, what was that piece of it,
[00:05:54] Oshri: So, I like to say that behind every entrepreneur is a pissed off employee. Right? Like, deep inside the entrepreneur is just an angry employee. They used to be an employee, nobody listened to them. Nobody cared. Even though they wanted to do the best. Because most businesses, they don't, do not care. You know, they're successful despite the owners, despite the executives. That's the reality, right? They hit, kicked, they hit something on the,they found a niche and they, and they went with it. and so after a frustrating 10 years in the corporate world, right, working with stars, working with corporates, I identified a niche.
I identified a need for a CTO. Who is temporary, who is there for a short period of time because, and I will take this to the grave and this is the hill that I will die on. Most companies don't need a full time CTO, just like they don't need a full time CFO, just like they don't need a full time legal department or full time legal,in their organization. You're not big enough for that. Just, you're just not. And so I am 100 percent sure that we can, Lead technology on a part time basis, and I have proven that over and over again. None of my clients hired full time CTOs.
[00:07:16] Jay: how do you keep the quality up? As the technical lead, I mean, I'm a QA guy. I run a QA agency. So obviously it's a very biased question, but how is quality kind of at the forefront? Right? Because I mean, if you're going in as a fractional CTO and not instilling processes that promote quality and promote good products and promote all these things, nobody's going to hire you.
They're not going to rehire you. They're not going to refer you anywhere. So how are you kind of making sure that these are high quality products that come out the end of the funnel? Okay.
[00:07:47] Oshri: So, the quality of the product is very much dependent on the, on, on what the product is, on product management. There's many other factors than the code itself, right, of course. However, from an architectural point of view, it's easy enough to put, to set up and whatnot. But the quality of the code, via automated testing. So, I train and I teach everyone how to write proper tests. That's just a small part of the job, but an absolutely required part of the job, right? To do automated testing. And the, and the reality is that a developer, a good developer,in any company that has a mature and, engineering culture will write 10 times more test code than actual code that produces whatever value. That's the reality. And so I want to automate the whole thing and what can't be automated goes to QA people right away, right? There's some things that can't be automated Deep customizations and that you just can't catch every edge case You need humans to catch the edge cases for you And then you need to write tests to avoid them from ever happening again But you definitely don't need to hire a full time QA person hiring a QA an outsourcing QA company to the QA regularly is fine it's, it's a much better use of your time and money.
[00:09:08] Jay: You're advertising for me. This is what I love to hear. that's all we do. We are an outsource QA shop. So, I agree. And I, the funny thing is that I used to shy away, you know, as you and we'll maybe dig into this a little bit on your side too. But when, as I matured. My ability to sell. I stopped shying away from things that I shied away from earlier in my sales career, right?
Cause people will go, well, we just want a full time QA person. We want a full time QA staff. And I used to go, okay, thank you very much. You know, have a nice day. But now I go. No, you don't. Right. And I have my list of reasons why they don't just kind of some of the ones you just laid out. And this is why it's probably better to hire a fractional QA team or augmented outsource QA team like us.
so, how, so tell me a little bit,you spun back out into consulting,
who was your first consulting client after you jumped back out of the corporate world?
[00:09:58] Oshri: My first consulting. no, I know. Yeah, definitely won't name names, but you want names. You go on my website. You see all the names of the companies. That's not really a secret, right? They're all happy customers. So, I hope so. I don't know. Pretty sure they're all happy customers. So no one's called to complain so far So my first customer I was trying to figure out this whole fractional CTO business and I'm like, okay, is it all about development?
Okay So I got a development client and I'm hacking away for months and months and months and I'm like no man This is not it. You got to be way higher level than that Right? And so I started moving into the, into the executive realm of the fractional CTO, into the executive realm, into strategy tactics.
and I said, I will not touch code. I should not be touching code. And the reason why I say this is because I leverage my client's teams to do And as soon as I made that shift in the package, in the product, it is a product, even though it's a service, it's a product, right? So as I made that shift, people started resonating with that.
It made sense to them, like, okay, so you come in, you train my people. Yeah, I train your people. And then you leave. Yeah, I leave. And then I stick around lurking on Slack if there's any questions. And you pay me a tiny little retainer just to lurk around, right? And so, they get the technical leadership they need, they don't spend, 300, 000, 400, 000, 500, 000 a year you would need on a full time CTO. Well, you know, that's a pretty interesting one. No equity, no nothing. And from that point on, my real clients came to me within a few, within six months of starting my practice, and I realized that They don't, so, sorry, After that, I started signing some clients, fractional CTO, but on an hourly basis. Right? I work an hour, you pay me an hour, and so on and so forth, and I invoice you and whatnot. But what I realized was that, what I realized was that, When you sell yourself on a per hour basis, your clients value you by the hour and I started getting questions Like can you do this in under five hours?
How much is it gonna cost if you come to the off site? How can I just because it's gonna cost if you got a coach by people and I'm like, this is not the way to work I mean by the hour because the reality is you literally cannot pay me enough for my advice You can pay me a hundred thousand dollars for an hour of my time still not enough Because I will position you and point you in the direction early enough To avoid hundreds of problems, hundreds of mistakes. So, so, so I migrate, I change the product again. changed it to a retainer model. You pay me once per month. Either it's one hour or two hours per day. But I'm always available. WhatsApp, Slack, you know, you're always connected. I got a watch. Client needs me. Boom. Sends me a message on WhatsApp. I pick up the phone and I call him. Right away, right? I'm on Slack. I take care of the entire team. And yeah, I can do it in two hours a day, even less. Because when you believe that people are smart, humans are smart, they can learn if guided properly and they want to learn. If guided properly, you can make absolute miracles, right? I believe that the people working for my clients are smart. The ones who are not will be filtered out rather quickly. They'll be, boom, immediately, they'll be filtered quickly. And so, From that point on, That's when my business just Into the stratosphere. Just nuts. I think I had eight months of Twelve hour days Including Sundays. I was only one day off and I was comatose on that day. And I still needed to be a father, right?
[00:13:51] Jay: Right. Right. That's also a tough part to mix in. so how are you targeting your clients today? What are you, what methods are you using to find them, reach out to them? I mean, you've built this kind of successful consulting practice. You
switch your, you know, a model around that kind of self weed out some less than great prospects just in the discovery process.
I would imagine. how are you getting new clients today?
[00:14:18] Oshri: They find me. So they find me. I don't shut up on LinkedIn. Have you noticed?
No, you haven't
[00:14:24] Jay: I have noticed you have a great president. I was actually gonna bring that up and that may, it's probably something to touch on, but that's a great. Is that scheduled, by the way, or is it just whenever you fire it off now, just fire
[00:14:34] Oshri: I, whenever I, you know, my ADD dyslexic brain kicks into a, into high gear and I make a connection between this problem and that problem, like, Oh, that's a good problem to talk about. I stop what I'm doing, literally. In the middle of doing whatever it is. boom type something up, because otherwise I'll lose it. I used to do scheduled posts. I used to and I found I was disconnected from the content, and so when people were commenting on it, I'm like, what are you commenting on, what the hell did I say, I don't
remember. I scheduled it a month ago, I don't remember. So, my personal engagement, wasn't really there. And people kind of feel, you know, your network feels it when it's a scheduled post. It's not it's out of context with the times and whatnot. So, you know, I make a post I answer it I start commenting on it and so on and so forth and people have gravitated towards that.
[00:15:25] Jay: And that's how you get a lot of, you get a lot of inbound leads through those, through
[00:15:28] Oshri: percent of all my leads 100 percent of all my leads called me saying I want to hire you because I've seen you on LinkedIn. I've Applied some of the advice you're freely giving out 50 percent of the sale is done on the first call when we say hello They want me they contacted me. So this is fantastic. This is great
So that you know, Yeah.
that's the ideal part and then after that is just Trying to convert them which is not that complicated to be honest because once they want you it's really it's yours to lose
[00:16:04] Jay: Right. And that's mainly cultivated just by your LinkedIn posts.
[00:16:10] Oshri: Just by my LinkedIn posts now that I've been in business for a year I made a very good, decent amount of money and I have runway to invest in marketing. I'm going to be doing a, a full Google and LinkedIn based ad campaign, right? For all the services that I offer,and just going absolutely wild on that because I'm building an agency now that I did it.
I did fractional CTO on my own for about 18 months now. cracking 20 months, I'm going to be moving forward towards an agency model now because it's just, you can't, you can only do so much work. If I was busy 10 months out of the year, because I'll take, I, I've told myself I take two months off in the summer. Straight up, I can do that. Why not? Otherwise, what's the point of doing all of it? What's the point of doing what we're
doing? Why not just get a job, Right.
That's it. So, if I did, you know, if I worked full time, 10 months out of the year, without, you know, like without 40 hours a week, this is an easy 3 quarters of a million dollar business for one person.
That's the reality. Because I service so many people. I can handle 10 clients at a time.
[00:17:22] Jay: So what does the switch to an agency look like for you?
[00:17:26] Oshri: Get those leads in coming like crazy. I need deal flow. I need a lead pipeline. Just gotta build that up first. I can't build the agency and just wait. So I have to invest close to 20, maybe 40, 000 a month on marketing. Get those leads in. And then work out which leads are the ones that we want to target. Which ones, we, which ones are the most compatible with the service. And then adjust the marketing so I, I get more of the good leads, less of the bad leads, obviously. That takes about three to four months to really learn. To properly learn and understand, it takes that much time.
[00:18:06] Jay: Yeah. No, I agree. All right. Last question. Non business related. If you knew you could do anything on earth. And you knew you couldn't fail. What would it be?
[00:18:16] Oshri: farming.
[00:18:18] Jay: Farming. Such a quick answer. You must have farming on the brain 24 hours a day if that's your answer. Farming.
Please indulge me.
[00:18:28] Oshri: Working with the land, work with my hands, put some music on, take care of my plants, take care of some animals, and then go home in the afternoon when it's too hot and build some other software,
[00:18:41] Jay: Drink lemonade on your front porch of
[00:18:43] Oshri: that's it. and have a slow life. that's all I care about. I don't care to work 40 hours a week. I don't want to. I want to build something, I want to potentially maybe sell it, but I want a quiet life.
That's it. How much money does one person need, really, to be
[00:19:00] Jay: I know. At some point you realize it's about giving back. And like you said, that family slow life is beautiful. Nobody's ever said farming, by the way. So that's a great first answer. I love that. All right. I'll show you people trying to find you. I know that they can find you on LinkedIn.
where else can they find you? What else are you, whatever else you have going on?
[00:19:17] Oshri: my website, ohsricohen. me, that's it. You send me an email, I'll respond within a few hours, usually. Or within a day if the email doesn't get lost in my other emails,
it happens.
[00:19:29] Jay: it does happen. All right, so we'll have people email you we'll link your Your linkedin profile and the show notes, asher. You're fantastic brother I really appreciate you and have a good rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Okay.
[00:19:40] Oshri: Thank you, have a good one.
[00:19:41] Jay: Thanks asher. See ya