[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. My name is Jay Aigner. Welcome to The First Customer podcast today. I am lucky enough to be joined by Sean Languedoc. Did I get it right?

[00:00:35] Sean: You got it. Good man.

[00:00:36] Jay: that's beautiful. Outforce. ai and as an agency owner, I'm sure that Sean and I will have plenty to talk about. Sean, how are you, buddy?

[00:00:46] Sean: I'm doing awesome. How you doing?

[00:00:48] Jay: I'm great. You're up in America's hat, as we like to say down here, up in Canada. that's

[00:00:53] Sean: the pink hat.

[00:00:54] Jay: the big old hat, in Quebec. well, thanks for hopping on today. Tell me where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur?

[00:01:03] Sean: I grew up in Canada and I grew up in Toronto but I spent most of my life at Western Canada and now I'm in Quebec. so I don't think that had any influence on how I became an entrepreneur, but, you know, being, and when I, and I'm kind of older, so most of my peers were told, as we were told, you sort of go into career mode, not an entrepreneurial mode.

So I was the black sheep in the bunch. So, but that's kind of my nature.

[00:01:29] Jay: So what was the first business you started? That was a real business.

[00:01:32] Sean: A real business? Well, in this, the thing that got me in entrepreneurialism was actually an American who I met when I was traveling in Europe. And, I was going to go back and do my MBA. And he said, what are you going to do an MBA for? I said, well, I, because I want to learn how to do business. He goes, well, why don't you start a business?

And I said, well, because I don't know anything about it. So he said, well, you're going to learn more starting a business. You should go into a business, right? It would cost less than an MBA, start it, and if you fail, you'll learn more than anyone in their MBA school is going to learn. And if, and you know, you can still go back and do an MBA if you really want to do it after that.

And that's what got me going. I never turned back. It was awesome.so the answer

[00:02:10] Jay: great advice. I love that advice.

[00:02:12] Sean: he said, beg, borrow and steal 10 grand or whatever it takes. I got a good 30 grand for the NBA, and, take a third of that and go for it. And that was, that worked in the business. I started to go answer your question.

I came back to Canada. We were inviting the world to Vancouver, British Columbia, for the world's fair. It was, expo 86. And, I had this idea. I had a few ideas for it. The one that I actually got going on was to, you know, I love outdoors and I love nature and,and I used to be a canoe tripping guide.

So I wanted to take people to places just outside of Vancouver, you know, to explore horseback riding or, rafting and stuff like that. And so the idea was to make connective tissue between everyone coming to Vancouver and those operations that weren't right in the city. So I bought a van and started, you know, And some advertising flyers went around all the hotels and started to get to know the concierges to answer your first question about what's your first customer, and got to know them and then took them on a fam tour, which is where they go and do this thing for free.

And then you got to know them better. Got a good relationship going. Explore86 starts now. It is such a success and so consuming that everybody comes to Vancouver, doesn't do anything else but Expo 86. So even the businesses just on the perimeter of the city had their worst summer ever. So here I am. I got no business.

I go, what am I going to do? And I have no money left. So, but I did have two things. I had a van. And I had a network. And so I went back to those people and I said, look, everyone who comes to Vancouver, one thing they do, and this is getting towards the later part of the summer, where holidays were instead of three days, beginning of Expo was spring, but when you get into summer, you get more five day holidayers.

So anybody who goes to Vancouver is always told. You gotta go to Victoria, go to the Bouchard Garden, it's like this famous garden. And so everyone goes, and either they go by car on their own, and they have no idea what they're looking at or what they're doing, or they take a Greyhound bus and they're in with a bunch of, you know, retired people and it's not too exciting.

So I said, okay, I'm going to introduce something that's in between those two. I call it Champagne Tours, you know, we wake up in the morning, champagne and orange juice in the van, we get to the ferry, I did all kinds of things to make it extra special. But I didn't have any marketing money. I had nothing.

So I literally gave around the itinerary to the concierges and said, look, this is my plan. You know me. and it's a good, it's a good midway alternative. and so they gave me a few customers. I had to take cash because I had to pay for the ferry. No credit card stuff. Guy, I'm sorry, I'm about to take cash.

And so I literally paid for it as I floated through. and to get into the Bouchard Garden and all those things. But at the end of the day, I gave each of the female guests a rose. Which was my viral network networking play. And I didn't know it would be so, so viral. But they'd come back to the hotel and the concierge would obviously wanna know, Hey, this is a new thing.

We gotta find out how it worked out. Oh, isn't that nice? You know, you got a rose from your husband at the boots chart guards. He goes, oh no, George would never do that. That was Sean that was most amazing to her ever, and blah, blah, blah. And then things went crazy. So that was my first deal.

[00:05:21] Jay: how, when you say things went crazy, like what size did that business grow to?

[00:05:28] Sean: By the end, by the middle of the summer, I was doing three vans. I had staff, I had everything going. Unfortunately, I didn't have a license to operate that routeand the operations and the licenses were run by a committee, which was owned by the existing licensees. So they were highly, you know, they were negatively impressed by my initiative

[00:05:49] Jay: and basically shut me down.

[00:05:51] Sean: I reinvented it into a smaller local, tour company. but basically it was a small business to get me to understand how to start a business. And so the next play was to go into something with a few more zeros behind it. And I went into commercial real estate,left that to go into,into another business of my own, which was, which was in the business of long story short, as I raised a bunch of money for the Vancouver Olympic bid, got to know a bunch of the chief marketing officers, And at the time, sorry, I'm rambling.

that's all right. It's all right. No, it's fine. Go ahead. second business, was in the late nineties, you know, you had this disruption of the middle person in a large vertical. So think of stock trading. You used to call your broker would make your trade, get 15 points or whatever, how many points on the trade, just for knowing what was available and how to trade, right?

Same thing with the travel industry. You used to go to a travel agent, they would book all your hotels and all your airlines because they knew what was available. They had the data in front of them and only accessible through a Gemini system. Now that it was accessible on the internet, Expedia shows up and all of a sudden disintermediated.

So in the advertising world, television or advertising buying was done by media buying agencies, which aggregated all the, you know, the creative agencies would create the ads, but the media buyers would pool their power. And, and by all this media, well, there was, they were getting 15 points on it.

That was the biggest profit center of the agency world. So I got to know these chief marketing officers and I said, Hey, what about building a system like that is disruptive in that same way so that you have the end data on what's available and you who just hire a few people, you know, 35, 40 grand and pop to just do the research and do the buying for you save hundreds of millions of dollars.

And everybody said, yes.except one and, the guy said it was the stupidest idea I've ever heard in my life. Well, I'd raised a bunch of, a bit of money. I was getting it going. He said, what do you mean? He said, think about it. I'm the chief marketing officer of a big brand. Yeah. Okay. How did I get here?

I, I guess you're really good. He goes, no, I don't take a lot of risk.and in the current dynamic of ad campaign fails, who gets fired? The agency, you put all these bodies under my watch, who gets fired? The coach. I'm out. No, I'm not going to do it. And I, so I went around the circle again. I said, oh yeah, that's a good idea.

that's probably right. That's probably right. So that changed the business dynamic. And instead of creating something disruptive, instead you create something that would embrace what was The current problem in the industry, and that was data migration between the two systems that were buying and selling.

So, I built something that was, and the pitch was, we're bringing the three martini back because there's no more data re entry. And, that's what they all used to love. So, that was business number two. So lesson learned out of that was don't take yes or no. Go for it. As an answer, dig, find out why, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're always thinking of the positive outcome.

You're always thinking this is going to work because and you're always thinking about how it can work. Ask questions about what would be what would make it not work yet under the skin of where the business is going to go. Hope that helps, Jay.

[00:09:20] Jay: Yes. No, I think it's great advice and, echoes, one of my favorite kind of mentalities is that, you. You can't you can disprove something doesn't work before it goes live, but you can't prove something works before it goes live. Right? So you can think it's going to work and you think it's going to be the best, but until it's actually people's hands.

So, yes, you want to hear as many. That won't work stories as you can to kind of make sure you're solid before you go live. So I love that story. All right, what was business number 3?

[00:09:49] Sean: Ha!business number three was, I came out of that,I'll skip one because I wasn't the founder of it. the, after it was a, and it was too long a sales cycle, it was an engineering product. and I just don't, I don't have an attention span. So went back to digital and, in the space that I know, which is advertising and media, and it was during the startup of Facebook and, Twitter and Instagram and not Instagram, but,Pinterest, you know, there were a lot of brands that wanted to know how to work social media.

and they just didn't know how they're so used to traditional media. And so we created a platform for. I came in as turnaround CEO for this, a platform for contests and sweepstakes. So like Bed Bath and Beyond would do a wedding, you know, a contest, write the best wedding, plan the best wedding ever.

And then their friends would, people who wrote it would write all their friends and say, hey, vote for my thing. And that got them onto the platform, got more of a database of who's interested in weddings. And guess what? That was a great way to access social media and start building a following for the brand.

Now the mistake the company was making is they were going after the brands. And I went after the agency which would give you hundreds of brands. And that the agency be the, the hero in getting to social media. And that was a good,

[00:11:10] Jay: so I've lost count.

[00:11:12] Sean: we're up to three.

[00:11:14] Jay: We're up to 3.

[00:11:15] Sean: so I've been four tech companies. the next one was, and so we sold that company. payload was the next one. It was basically Uber meets oilfield trucking.nice one because I didn't have to raise any money. I was hired in as the. Entrepreneur in residence in a family office that had done very well in oil field trucking.

So they knew the business and they needed an entrepreneur who could start a technical business. they knew the trucking side. I didn't know anything about technology. I couldn't believe nobody had done this before. I mean, it was so obvious, but in the oil business, it's a people business. And, it's really built on trust and relationships because everything happens out in the field, like it's, things can go wrong, you need friends to help you out, right?

So there's a lot of horse trading stuff going on out there and this was going to bring a little more discipline to it, which is disruptive in a way.and, and so basically it's uber meets oilfield tracking so you can see where the truck's going and where it's coming back. You can also optimize so you don't have empty loads on the way back and, and that worked out really well.

And, the first customers in there were smaller, exploration companies that were drilling. but it grew into Shell, Chevron, and a bunch of others. That was good.

[00:12:23] Jay: did you get that there's initial customers from those relationships that they will folks had already.

[00:12:30] Sean: Yeah. They've got the founder, the family behind that. The guy had, it's a great story. his story is a great story on first customer. He was born in a small farm, a small town way up in Northern Alberta, with a small on a small farm and his dad died. He had to support the family at 16, got a job light about his age, got a job on a rig.

This is back in the sixties.and he watched them as they, As you drill for oil, water comes out of the well, because it sits on top of the oil. And they would just spill that water all over the ground. And he went, well, that's not, like I come from farming, that's not what you do to dirt. And so he decided To go into the first environmental services in the oil sector.

And he said, I'm going to go, he went and leased a truck, to carry water from the well site to the municipal, waterworks and, just as a start. Right. Well, it was a 40, 000 investment and everyone said, you're crazy. No one, why would they ship the water out? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

And this is the sixties. So it's not too far. And, he parlayed that 40 grand investment into a 5 billion exit. But 40 million 40 years later and lots of technology and other things and acquisitions through it. So it was a great relationship. He was a very entrepreneurial young heart He was 75 when he started this company

[00:13:54] Jay: wow,

[00:13:54] Sean: and he got shell the kind of rig that he worked for the first time Shell was the first one to do it.

[00:14:02] Jay: Little mom and pop shop shell,

[00:14:05] Sean: Yeah.

all right. Does that bring us to outforce?actually it does. Yeah. Yeah. So you heard

[00:14:11] Jay: so let's hear. The story I've heard, smatterings of. The word agency being thrown around, So where did outforce. They, I come from and all this,

[00:14:26] Sean: spatterings of what

[00:14:29] Jay: you mentioned agencies, you know, working with and for going after the agencies that some of the other businesses that you worked at. So, it seems like you've had some experience working with agencies, which I'm assuming. Helped without force,

[00:14:40] Sean: Yeah. definitely. So You know, as an entrepreneur, when you're starting a company often, especially if you're the business side of it, you look for technical expertise to help you get started, right? And a lot of people will just give 30 percent of the company to their friend who's the only person that was a really good engineer and he's a hacker and he can build shit that isn't not necessarily the best solution.

and sometimes it's better to just to hire an agency that has expertsin the business, that can build something for you. They can give you fractional use of a, of an expert in the UI UX. They can give you fractional use of an architect, all those things. And ultimately you don't have to give up as much equity.

Right. To get your proof of concept product built and then use the proof of concept to build out the The product market fit right because proof of concept and actual product market fit are a long way apart There's a lot of engineering to go And when you get product market fit, then you bring in your engineering team and you start replacing them maybebecause You you know You can give up a lot less equity and even that engineer might the hacking the hacker engineer is not often the engineer That's going to take the company To the end zone.

It's a great engineer to start a company, but a hacking engineer doesn't necessarily understand structure and systems in order to build a high level engineering organization. So you can have a very unfortunate conversation later in life, you know, five years, three years down the road with that first engineer they gave so much equity to.so that's a reason to use an agency or you know, there's a whole bunch of reasons to, that you might want to use an outsourcing agency. And in my case, it was usually a bit later. we had, you know, a big customer, we had to build an API, front end for that customer, those kinds of things. or we had a trade show, we had to get the product up and running for that trade show and a new feature or something like that.

And it wasn't core to the team so we could run adjacent, an outsourcing agency. The problem with outsourcing is the opposite problem of hiring engineers. When you're hiring engineers, good ones are already taken, and so you have to hire them away from something. And, you know, that makes, it's basically a desert out there trying to find the right engineer.

[00:16:57] Jay: right?

[00:16:58] Sean: Whereas when you want to outsource, I mean, heck, you could probably get 10 in your inbox every day unsolicited. So it's just water everywhere and not a drop to drink. There's no, it's all white noise. There's no differentiation.

[00:17:11] Jay: Right.

[00:17:12] Sean: And, present company potentially accepted. They say they can do anything.

And generally, you know, they might be able to do a lot of things, but there's But some agencies are really good at doing one specific vertical because they've done multiple projects in the same vertical. So, so I decided to basically create, make it easier for entrepreneurs like me to select the agency, based on domain expertise, tech stack, bench strength.

And then most importantly, well, sorry, third is who's available on the team at the time of asking, and that's a critical factor. And then fourth, of course, is culture fit. Like, what's their style of engineering? How do they treat their own employees? what's their communication skills like? All those things, right?

Because if those don't align, You get a lot of miscommunication, and then things can go pretty south pretty fast. So basically, I started with a network that I had already around the world, and some, and a bunch locally, and then just did a ton of research and, asked some key questions that gave real answers, to build a database on who does what well in what tech stack. And now we're, you know, 79, 000 agencies in our database.

[00:18:32] Jay: And how, what's been your plan to monetize that? Did you, is it the same 1 that you set out with initially?

[00:18:41] Sean: Yes,

[00:18:42] Jay: does it change over time?

[00:18:43] Sean: Yeah. So between Payload and Outforce was a,pivot.my original business was H1B, moving H1Bs into Canada, who were being ousted by President Trump under the new rules. So that meant mostly me. Indian tech engineers who would have to go back to India, but it lived in the United States for 10, 12 years and couldn't get it.

You know, they were on a wait list for green card, usually the H1B renews. And, but now they were not renewing them. So, you know, the person has a great job, has a great relationship with their employer. I would hire them back to Canada because Canada has a very good immigration policy for tech workers.

And then I would contract them back to the United States. And that got me into sort of the, a closed loop engineering hiring business. It was just out of the depth. And then my Canadian entrepreneur friend said, Hey, you bring all these engineers to Canada. Can you bring me some? And I said, no, it's closed loop, but I could probably figure some shit out.

And so then I started an international recruiting business and I was bringing people from Ukraine and South Africa, all over the world, Brazil and Argentina. And then, and then COVID happened and it just shut everything down because we couldn't bring anyone anywhere. So good news about COVID remote became okay.

And better news about the business model is. Contracting is recurring revenue.hiring is one and done, right?

[00:20:13] Jay: So that's how I leveraged my external network to get the agencies. I'd found a bunch of people in other countries, knew a bunch of people. And so I asked them, what are the best agencies that you know of?

[00:20:23] Sean: Which is what most people do, right? Whenever they look for an agency.

[00:20:27] Jay: Right. 79, 000 is a big number. How many of those are in the United States?

[00:20:34] Sean: 3, 000. Now of the 3, 000, And we're doing the due diligence on this right now. Probably only 1, 000 are really American, you know, on the ground agencies. 2, 000 are agencies that have an office with one or two salespeople saying they're an American agency. So that's the challenge. So, so we're actually going back to the database, back to the vendors and saying, look, tell me where your engineers are

[00:21:07] Jay: then tagging based on that.

Got it.and maybe I missed it. How do you monetize the platform?

[00:21:16] Sean: So we kind of like a recruiting fee. we charge a slight markup on the pay rate to the agency. We don't take any money from the agency. This is what's unique about us is there are platforms out there that will talk about agencies. But it's kind of like help, like, do you trust Yelp for a restaurant collection?

It's paid and there's, and you know, you can get self promoted up to the top as well.in our case, it's we get paid by the vendor, by the client. We search on behalf of the client, we bring the shortlist to the client based on the best teams that are available from the agencies that are well tagged,

[00:21:53] Jay: and then we let them select, say five, five to seven that they want to interview, and then based on those interviews, they make their selections.

[00:22:00] Sean: So, we take, we get paid, and then we pay whatever the agreed, markup rate is, we keep the, whatever the agreed markup rate is, and pay whatever the client, whatever the vendor had bid as their net rate. So the net rate doesn't change for the vendor. Whatever they bid is there, is what they get paid?

[00:22:18] Jay: Got it. Very interesting. Is the customer the same today as it was when you started?

[00:22:29] Sean: no,

[00:22:30] Jay: has that changed over time?

[00:22:31] Sean: we're getting better reputational capital. So we're getting bigger enterprise cap, customers who, are not so like a pure, you know, bigger enterprise sometimes they have their fixed MSA relationships, so those are hard to break into, but sometimes you get projects that are, that are special and procurement has no clue how to.

Manage that process. Procurement's job is to bring the prices down, but they're not very good at, technology selection processes. And we're really good at that. and identifying who's bullshitting about what they can do. And yeah, we have a really cool way of interviewing agencies that really cuts through the crap.

[00:23:11] Jay: I like that. looks like you're up against it. I feel like we have some more stuff we can cover. Maybe I have to have you on again someday. You have too many things you founded. We didn't get enough. It's just too much entrepreneurialism. I do have one final question for you, non business related.

[00:23:26] Jay: if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:23:32] Sean: Anything on earth I wouldn't fail at. That's a really good question.

[00:23:38] Jay: Thank

[00:23:39] Sean: Anything on earth?

[00:23:40] Jay: that 1

[00:23:41] Sean: be a rock star.

[00:23:46] Jay: and not the 1st person to say

[00:23:47] Sean: I'd be a rock band,

[00:23:48] Jay: every time I hear it. I love that answer just for so many reasons. we'll leave it there. But I love that answer. all right, Sean, if you want to find more about you specifically for things they heard about this show, where can they find you?

And then where can they find, your company Outforce, dot AI, which I

[00:24:06] Sean: Well, you can find my company at outforce. ai.and,and you can email me at Sean at outforce. ai, that's Sean the Irish way, S E A N. and if you email me, I'm just finishing the, what I call the definitive guide to outsourcing. So whether you use our services or not to select an agency, it doesn't matter.

I really don't want any clients, anybody who's an entrepreneur, wasting time talking to an agency that's a waste of time. And there's so many ways to do that. Thank you. Just the fact that most people end up talking to the leadership of an agency as their interview process. Is the biggest waste of time because they'll all they take those calls all day.

They're pros at it They know how to answer and make it sound like they're going to give you exactly what you want And you don't know whether they can deliver it because you don't have the data. Nobody has the data Nobody has the time to do the due diligence. Nobody has the therefore nobody has the data and many big bad decisions as a result So yeah, I can give you all the secret questions.

We ask I can give you all kinds of stuff. And I just don't want you to lose money or time talking to the wrong agency

[00:25:12] Jay: Beautiful. Well, Sean, thank you so much for coming on today. I love it. Hope people check you out. and other than that, we'll stay in touch and have a good rest of your week. All right, buddy.

[00:25:19] Sean: Thank you, Jay.

[00:25:20] Jay: Thanks, Sean. See you, man. 

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