Sean: How weighty was it that you knew what your expertise was? You knew that you were an expert in this, this, this, and that, so much so that you deciding on risking some of your hard-earned money seemed like the best thing to do.

Alan: Yeah. What is that about entrepreneurs, right? Sean? I mean, why would someone do this? It's kind of masochistic, really. Right? It's really you don't know how much pain you're going to be inflicting on yourself when you do these things. And part of it is, I mean, candidly, it's somewhat naive, right? But I mean, in answer to your question, right? One of the attributes that people really hope to see in experts is the same thing that drives people into expertise. And it's this exuberance or confidence and your ability to change things, right? To do things a little bit differently and better. Right. And so that's really what it came down to, right? Experts are effective and influential if they're confident, and entrepreneurs will just absolutely fail if they're not confident, right? So I had some confidence. Maybe false, not well-placed confidence at the time, right? Because I learned a lot of things, right, but confident nonetheless.

Sean: Okay, another thing that I'm wondering about because when you're an entrepreneur, you got to be good at selling. If you can't sell, there's no business, no customers, no business. Now it's from being an IT expert, in-depth you know it up and down. You mentioned database server time, that's like, I'm a geek, right? I'm a geek. I know a geek, when I hear one, we're both geeks and we geek out in what we know, we're experts that stuff. But when was it when you decided "I got to learn how to sell and I need to sell and I got to be good at it? I got to be an expert at it”? When was that time and how did you hone your sales skills?

Alan: Well, it actually came to me, right? So I mentioned I was at Ford Motor Company and at that time, well, I mentioned this to you, maybe I should highlight this a little bit more. I was on the supplier's face of the business. I was communicating with suppliers and they were pitching to Ford Motor Company constantly, right. That they were selling to me, they were selling to Ford. And so I was able to observe all of these suppliers one after another sort of come in and talk about their solutions. And sometimes it's, you know, nuts and bolts and wheels. But sometimes it's, you know, consulting and, you know, a whole bunch of really strategic items. So I observed it from the buyer's side. But then when I went to the consulting company, I was on the selling side, right? I was pitching to large organizations for custom development, and I followed salespeople around for five years, helping pitch our solutions to large customers. And so that two-dimensional perspective on the selling process, as the buyer, and as the seller really opened this world or this idea of selling and producing revenue for me. It helped a lot.

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