Transcript Interview With Ed Kless

In our latest Leading Forward podcast episode, Maureen talks with Ed Kless, senior director at Sage, about innovation beyond technology and what it means to innovate. Ed shares a few great examples of we can innovate to better serve our customers. Listen to the full podcast here, and now you can watch the podcast recording here. 

Maureen:
Ed Kless with Sage. Ed is a repeat guest, our one and only repeat guest. And you are such a favorite that we had to bring it back. So welcome.

Ed:
Well, thanks. It's good to be back. I when I have folks on my podcast, the second or third time, I recall them recidivists

Maureen:
Repeat offender.

Ed:
Same thing, same thing. Yeah. Fancy word for the same thing. So I'm glad to be back, Maureen. Thank you so much for having me.

Maureen:
Just to remind folks what you do at Sage. Could you kind of run through it. I remember last time you were like a consultant to the consultants, the medic consultant. I think you described.

Ed:
Exactly. Very good. Yeah. So, that's the word? I, I think I, I think I coined it, but maybe I stole it from somebody else met a consultant because I spend an awful lot of my my time working with people who oftentimes consult with other people. So whether it's a, an accounting firm or people in an accounting firm who were working with their customers, or even in, for Sage, our mid-market products, people who are reselling and implementing our solutions in the mid-market, I spend my time working with them. So I am a consultant to people who consult. So therefore there's the medical consultant concept.

Maureen:
So our topic today is going to be innovation beyond technology. But before we jump into that, what, you know, what's going on at Sage? Are there any exciting things that have happened in the past year that you you'd like to update us on?

Ed:
Well, I think there's always things moving in a technology company. I think probably the, the biggest, cool thing about us as we really shifted over to more of a subscription-based strategy inside our organization as most software companies have, we also have brought to market and our new small business accounting package for SPCA say small business accounting, very excited about that full, full launch coming up in, in in 2022. We're we're just about to end our fiscal year right now. So that's, that's every everybody else, but me is, is concerned with that. But and then of course we continue to make strides, which with our Sage Intacct package, which is the leading really SAS product in the, in the mid market space.

Maureen:
It's kind of interesting that I'm talking to a guy at a technology company, that's going to talk about innovation beyond technology.

Ed:
Yeah. And so there's a, a brief, funny story that accompanies th th the origin of this about five years ago, or so the, one of the folks who is my colleagues here at Sage, her name is Jennifer Warwick. Those of you in the accounting professional, probably remember her. She had a big following. She has since moved on to another organization, not related to the space, but Jennifer was a very busy person. I think she, at one point logged over 200,000 miles flying around the world of this is obviously pre COVID, but I got a call from her. What, at one point where she said, Hey, ed, I can't be in New Jersey tomorrow. Or, or later this week, would you do this session for me? It's called innovation beyond technology. I'm like, yeah, sure, no problem, Jennifer, you know, and she said, don't worry. I have the slides all prepared for you.

Ed:
So all you need to do is just show up and deliver the presentation. I don't know no more Maureen if you ever tried to deliver somebody else's slides, it's not happening. Right. It's yeah. So I, I immediately said, thanks, Jennifer, appreciate it. And I kept one of the slides and then crafted my own session around the concept innovation beyond technology and said, okay you know, this is good. This is going to be mine now. So I appreciated her sending those those over. But you know, I, I came up with, I think some, some fun stories about organizations that have created some pretty neat innovations that are not technological obviously. And the reason for that is I think we get, we think, or because technology has made so many strides in the last, let's call it a decade or more. We automatically assume that innovation is technological in some way.

Ed:
When we think we think innovation, when we think apple, we think new iPhone, we think zoom, you know, we think podcasts, you know, there's some technological thing, but innovation doesn't have to be. I think we can innovate around things inside the business model as well. And one of the things I like to try to do is to talk about, well, what, what exactly is innovation? Because there's a difference between innovation and invention. Invention to me is coming up with something completely new that hasn't been done before. Whereas innovation is oftentimes putting together oftentimes disparate ideas and concepts to create something new out of that. And the, the one example that I, I, I, and this is the one slide that I kept from Jennifer. This is great. A photo of a, it's a stroller that has this little sidecar on it, like a little skateboard and the, you know, the you're pushing the stroller and there's the one kid in the stroll.

Ed:
And then the one kid standing on the, on the skateboard thing take getting the ride next to the stroller. And so, you know, the innovation here of course is, is that these two disparate ideas as a stroller and a skateboard, you know, if a stroller, stroller and a skateboard fell in love and got married, the offspring was looking, look like, look like this, this thing. And you know, I've got two kids that are four years apart. And I think, well, where was this thing when I needed this, this would have been great. I'd probably have a much better relationship with my older son. You know, how many times it was he hanging on the back of a stroller, I'm like stop hanging out. So it solved a very real problem. And I got to thinking about that. How often do we do we bring these different ideas together from different places to create new stuff?

Ed:
And that's really what innovation is and what, what are the, some of the things that we can do inside our organizations that, that facilitate that and allow for that to happen? The last thing I'll say here, just the way, way of introduction is innovation always comes as a surprise. It can't, I do not believe that innovation can be planned. We, we can, we can certainly facilitate it. We can give space for it. We can try to make sure that our firms are thinking about it in and brainstorming and having conversations about these things. But innovation by definition cannot be planned. Quite frankly, because if it could be than socialism would work, because then you could just plan everything from the top down. Right. We just said, okay. And that's the one thing that unfortunately, I think that socialism tends to leave out of the equation is the notion of innovation is that things change and that's the thing that's missing from it. So so Ken firms get better in innovation yes. By me by leaving space for it, but they can't plan it. They can't say we need to be innovative now. W w it won't happen. So anyway, that's just a caveat out there,

Maureen:
So, okay. One of the things that you, you touched on that I wanted to ask is, well, it sounded like there was a problem that needed to be solved. Is that, is that where you're suggesting that that folks start with, or is it even more disparate items? So how do you even start that?

Ed:
Yeah, I mean, it certainly is. It always is, is, is a potentially a problem that needs to be solved and how can, how can we apply these things together? And a lot of, a lot of times, it's just some creative thinking about things. Let me, let me give you an example. That's not that that's not part of the, the, this, the, this conversation, but, but I think really is a, is a good idea example of, of this kind of outside the box, thinking there's a, there's a guy who I'll talk a little bit more about later. His name is Rory Sutherland. He was the, the, the vice chair of Ogilvy and Mather in the UK. And he was asked one time to create a a campaign for this new, [inaudible] a new thing that they were doing to try to speed up the, the train that was go, that goes between London and Paris through the channel.

Ed:
And they went to him and said, okay, this is what we need. We need to do. We're spending, I don't know, 8 billion pounds or something on improving the speed to take it down from three hours to, or three and a half hours to three hours. And his response was quite interesting at first, he said, well, I wish you had come to me sooner because I could have saved you a lot of money. I saved the taxpayers a lot of money. And they were like, well, what do you, what do you mean? He said, well, instead of trying to speed the journey up, why don't we just put wifi on the trains and, or, and then, and then he made a joke and he said, well, let's take it one step further. Let's hire male and female supermodels to hand out free Chateau protrudes for the next 10 years to all of the passengers, we'll save about 70 billion pounds.

Ed:
And, and people will be asking to have the train slowed down. Right. So because the, the, the chain, the, the change in a half hour off of that journey is really not gonna make that much of a difference to people. Right, right. What they really want is a more pleasant journey. And again, this was about 10 years ago. And of course, now we see, you know, wifi is ubiquitous and people there's wifi and planes now, and on trains and all, all of these in, in public places and how important and improvement that has made in our, our lives. Right. To have access to that, because, you know, on your commute, you can work and do stuff, get stuff done.

Maureen:
Yeah. So I'm maybe getting a little deeper into what the customer actually wants. That's just what the customer wants.

Ed:
Yeah. I mean, the and, and even though the customer might not even ask for that per se, right. If you ask, what would you want the journey sped up? Well, yes, of course we want the journeys filled up. They will tell you that. Right. But if you're leading them in that, so, but what are some of the other things that, that an organization can do to make it better? Right.

Maureen:
Right, right. So how do you even create an environment where people will start thinking like that start being able to take those ideas and be open to those concepts instead of being like, well, you need to be innovative. Let's innovate.

Ed:
Yeah. We need to be innovative now. I think, I think that the, the answer is, is, is to get a group of different, a diverse group of people together, and have them talk about the situations that they're occurring. And, you know, I think w the, the, the diversity and inclusion initiatives, I think have been, been good, but I, I think that they're, they sometimes fall a little bit short because one thing that I will always ask is, well, are, do, are we getting a diversity of thought? Right, right. Cause it's not, it's not, I mean, it's not that that diversity has conceived of now is, is is necessarily a bad thing, but are we really getting people who think differently together? Or, or do we have a group of people who look different, but all think the same way. Right. Right. And what we want is to create spaces for that diversity of thought to come together and have conversations. So invite the, the people who are on the frontline invite, people who are interacting with customers every day, invite people who are marketing and who, who are talking to customers and get them all together in one space to create ideas around, Hey, what can we do? And just brainstorm through these, create these brainstorming sessions to say, look, can we try something like this? Right. And I, and I think that's really, really one of the keys is to, is to create those spaces and places for it.

Maureen:
Are there any recent examples of some innovation that you've seen in firms or in the accounting space that aren't technology related?

Ed:
Well, perhaps the most important one that's happened in the, probably the last 10 years is the sh the shift from using shoe boxes to zip lock bags to bring the, your receipts.

Maureen:
That's right.

Ed:
Although it's actually kind of true, isn't it? I mean, you know, the customers have innovated to us instead of shoe boxes, they bring their stuff in Ziploc bags now. Well, and because, you know, one of the challenges I think for especially accounting firms, and I know that your audience is beyond that because you have a number of, many of your members are in industry as well. But for accounting firms, is, is that accounting is, is, is there is a definition of equation, right? It's, it's not, it's not, there's really no such thing as accounting theory, although accountants like to talk about it because it's not a theory, it's an identity equation, right. Assets plus equity, equal liability. I mean, it's, I think this is that it's an identity question is whether we make there's no, we haven't, there's no been no invention of triple entry bookkeeping, or like, you know, where we've, we've, we we're now, now there may be, maybe that's something that the blockchain is going to help us with.

Ed:
And I've actually heard quite literally people use that example of triple entry bookkeeping. Right. so, so perhaps it's possible that, that, that that's an innovation, but the rest last really innovative thing that I think came out of, of the, the, the CPA profession related specifically to accounting was the, the statement of changes in financial position. Right. Being replaced by the statement of cash flows. Right. And that, you know, that yes, that's an innovation is probably more helpful, especially to finance people, but it's not, oh, that's what a incredible innovation. Right. Right. So I think we have to begin to think beyond that certainly the, the use of the electronic spreadsheet was something that, that that's w what was, was incredible. But again, that was that really, really an innovation per se. But, but let me give you an example, I, that I think is at least finance related.

Ed:
Okay. and so this, this is an example that comes, that, that came out of Germany. There's a car company. I think it was ADI that in Northern Germany, they, they test marketed this a couple of years ago. I think this is six or seven years ago. They were, it was the classic end of year, time end of year models. And they wanted to sell some more cars. So they're sitting around this ideation session and, you know, the finance people show up with their spreadsheets and say, well, here's what we can do. We can do, we can take 3000 Euro off the price of the car. And one guy who is on the marketing team said, well, can't we do any better than that. And, you know, the, the finance people looked at each other and says, well, 4,000 year old would be better, but our spreadsheets don't work if it's 4,000 Euro.

Ed:
So we can't do that. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. Instead of taking 3000 euros off the price of the car, how about we add 3000 euros on top of the trade-in value of the car that the, the person is coming to us with, and the finance people are looking at each other and it's like, well, it's the same thing. Okay. The guy says, it's the same, same thing. If you're a finance person, just not, if you're a human being. Right. And, you know the concept is this is, is that the 3000 year old off the price of say a $34,000 car is less than 10%, but 3000 Euro on top of a trade-in of say 7,000 Euro is almost an additional 50% on top of that. Trade-In. So they said, okay, well, let's test market this.

Ed:
And they test marketed this in two different cities in Northern Germany. So, you know, fairly homogenous population. And when, you know, they sell, they sold one and a half times, the number of cars were sold where they get the 3000 Euro on top of the trade-in, that's an incredible increase. Right. So when you think about that, and so, so you begin to think about this, and you've probably have seen more and more companies have moved towards this. If you bought, bought a car, probably in the last three or four years, you've seen that, that, that your trade in is usually added to, rather than a price off the, off the sticker price, because they found it was so much more successful. And of course, that's one of the dangerous with any of this stuff is that it can be copied. Right. But but, but, but that's, that's okay.

Ed:
It's still a, a wonderful innovation. And now how can this apply? Let let's, let's say, let's say you're in a business that has is doing, replacing say whatever it is that your product does replaces a current product that your current, that your customers had. Well, the default value for most people is to offer discounts to offer that off their price in order to get the customer, to adopt their technology. Well, what if you were to say, no, we were not going to give you a discount, but when you adopt our technology, when you go live on our system, when, when, when you put in place, whatever it is that we have to offer, we will buy your old system from you for, and put down a price. You know, the three indicates they'll just use the 3000, which was the example from the car, but it has to really be w we're going to write them a check for $3,000 not, oh, we'll give you a $3,000 credit, or it has to be, you know, we're, we're gonna wire you, it doesn't that wire Trent doesn't have to be a physical check, but we've, we've got, it's gotta be something that we really give back to you now think about what this does too, is it creates incentive not only for the purchase, but it also creates an incentive around they're fully adopting the new thing.

Ed:
Right. And one of the things that I hear, especially from technology partners is, well, we have a difficult time often understanding when they've crossed the line. Like when, when is, when is our stuff officially adopted, right. Well, this puts a line of demarcation and says, well, when they do, you're going to write them a check. So it significantly increases that incentive as well.

Maureen:
They, they, that, that whole to running two things at the same time forever, because there's just, for whatever reason, the comfort, the training might push people along and provides the, the company information that's valuable to them, too.

Ed:
Exactly. So, you know, in, in, in that case, it's a, it's creating the proverbial win-win scenario for both. Right. And I think that's, what's important, you know, and so I call that inner that's an innovation around, it's really a pricing innovation. I, you know, I I've, I've taught talk a lot about value based pricing, which is clearly the, of innovation as well. But I mean this innovation I'm talking about is irrespective of how you price things right from, from, from that perspective. But I think the, the, you know, another really neat one is is around innovation innovating the experience that, that the customer has at least initially with, with us. I was just out at the AICPA engage conference in Las Vegas about four weeks, five weeks ago now. And, you know, I'm always amazed by the, you know, the aria hotel there.

Ed:
If you go to the Aria hotels website, there's this beautiful picture of the lobby. It's big open space, very lovely. But then my experience, you know, and there's usually like one person standing at the desk. My experience when I walk into the Aria is usually now a line that's, you know, serpentining around most of this big, wide open space, and it takes me a an hour to check in and what the, it curiously the, Gaylord hotel chain did this study a number of years ago, they said that the, the number one predictor of whether or not a guest was satisfied with the hotel stay was the, their experience checking in. So if they had, if they had, if they had a really good experience checking in, they were more apt to want to find other reasons that this was a good place to stay.

Ed:
You know, I think the ice sculpture is very lovely. The meals that they have, the bathrooms were excessively clean, you know? So it really colors the rest of your experience with that. Whereas if people had a bad check-in experience, they're like, well, that ice sculpture is garbage. Look at it's melting all over the place. And because it's confirmation bias. What we're looking for is to just reinforce our original opinion of what happened. And we want, we want to think of this as a nice place as a nice hotel. And curiously enough, that I can, I can recall my previous experience was the RA where we're like this, you know, one hour check-in experience, well, this last time and I think this is a great innovation due to COVID in a way I didn't interact with anybody. My room key came to my phone and I showed up at the hotel and immediately went to the room. Now, could you say that that's a technological inner from innovation? Yes. But it's also innovating the customer experience as well. Right. My experience was dramatically increased because of the, of the, of the way that they handled that. Right. Right.

Maureen:
So that makes me think of when we're thinking of other customer experiences, especially things that happen online, that whole purchase process of did I have, was it easy? Is that my, is that first impression going to change anything else that happens after that I'm taking a class online? If it was hard to register, then I'm sure it's not going to work. I'm sure this is going to happen. The speaker was not great. It confirms everything after that. So really picking apart, what is that first step in the door?

Ed:
Yeah. And that's what I think that folks need to figure out is, you know, what, what is their check-in experience? And it quite literally can be a check-in experience. I mean, you, you, you make a great point there is one that goes back, oh gosh, probably a dozen years or so. I'll pin this on the sages of the world and our first forays into what we used to call e-commerce. And I guess it's still is to a certain extent e-commerce solutions where what we would do is we would mimicked the process that happened in the back office, on the web. So you would surf into a particular place, and they're like, okay, well, I want to take this class, or I want to buy this product didn't matter.

Ed:
Well, the first thing you got to do is fill out your customer information. So when you need your name, we need your address. So you need your social security number. We need your blood type. We need all of this, that there's this information and what it, all of us do when we had that experience. Well, for the most part, we will like click close, like, or back. And who's the next one up, because we didn't like that experience of having to provide all of this information in front of the reason, of course, was the backend system at the time. Well, in order to create an order, I first needed a customer record, right. So we got to create the customer record first, and we're just mimicking the process. Well, the one organization, there's a, actually I can send you the link to this, if you want to provide it in your show notes, that fast company it's called the $300 million continue button that this online retailer increased sales by $300 million by replacing register now with continue, because all of us want what we wanted was the experience of going in and seeing what they had to offer, clicking on something, maybe putting it in the shopping cart.

Ed:
And then afterward we were more than happy to fill out our name and info and address and phone number and all of that stuff, because we felt, we felt already committed to the fact that, Hey, we were wanting this product, right. And again, you know, the, the, the, the Mr. Spock's of the world, the logical people, that to them, there's no difference to the engineers. It's like, well, what's the difference? It's, we're getting the same information and the same amount of time. There's no change from an efficiency standpoint, but from an effectiveness standpoint, it would make, it makes a huge, huge difference because the customer doesn't like to be in it, we don't like to be in put through the inquisition before we buy something.

Maureen:
Right. So you've, you've given us a pricing example an experience example, are there others that you have?

Ed:
Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's take one that that is, is pretty profound. And, and I, I think has great societal impacts. And this, this is another one that was developed by that guy. Rory Sutherland that I mentioned the again, the, I think this was the national health service, the over there came to him and said, or came to Ogilvy. Actually what we wanted to do is we wanted to do an ad campaign, public awareness on a very real problem, which is people are not finishing their entire course of antibiotics. And I believe over there you don't need a prescription for an antibiotic. You can walk into a pharmacy and they will just give you an antibiotic. At a certain level, you probably need a prescription for some of the higher end stuff, but like just a basic antibiotic, you don't need a prescription so people would walk in, but with what they would do is say that, say the, the, it was, you know, take, take one pill a day for seven days.

Ed:
Well, what people have a tendency to do with this is they'll take one pill for three or four days. They feel better. And they're like, okay, well, I'll save the other three. If I don't, you know, if I don't recover from this and that way, I don't have to go back to the store to get this, you know, second, second set of prescription, all of this stuff. And I'll still have this. Now in many cases that actually still does work so that the person does feel better and they do do fully recover. However, it creates a very real problem in that, because it doesn't kill the bacteria off in the prescribed time, the bacteria that linger tend to be the stronger ones. And of course, we're seeing this with the, with COVID and variations and all this type stuff that, that has emerged out of this as well.

Ed:
And this, the same process happens with bacteria as well as as, as viruses, right? So whatever you tend to pass on in, you know, days five through seven happens to be a stronger strain of that bacteria because it's survived the first initial course of the antibiotic. So then the next person that gets, it gets the stronger strain. And of course they, if they do the same thing and take the it passing on creating stronger and stronger bacteria require stronger and stronger antibiotics in order to deal with this problem. So it's a very real society, societal problem. So they wanted to do this ad campaign to bring public awareness, to add to this. And he said, no, I don't think that that is going to be helpful. He says, here's what we'll do. Let's do this instead. Let's change the, the, the the, the usage, how the customer uses and say, this we're going to put the PA in the package, we'll say, take six white pills.

Ed:
And then the one blue pill on the seventh day and low and behold, what happened is, is that it's significantly increases the people who finished the course of the antibiotic, because they, because we then chunked it down into a two-step process of take one pill a day for six days, and then one on the seventh. Now that seventh one can be either the same pill, or it could even be a placebo, right. It could be, but it doesn't even matter. But at that point, you finished the course of the antibiotic and what the, now, it wasn't perfect. People still did their old tricks, but even that significant reduction or increased, I'm sorry, in them finishing the course of an antibiotic can have a very real effect on some of these, the, these bacteria and stuff. And I think that's a wonderful example of, so what can we do to innovate around the customer usage, the way the customer and the, you know, the example that I go to, and I think this has stopped for the most part, but if you know, those of you listening to this bot, gastro is still doing this.

Ed:
If you have, you know, your tax practices, and you're still standing sending out the 70 page tax planning guide to your customers, I'm begging you to please stop doing that right now. Cause I can remember getting it from my CPA at the time and thinking if I could fill this stupid thing out, I could do the dang return,

Maureen:
Put it in your Ziploc bag and be done. Right.

Ed:
Exactly. You know, so I'm less likely to fill out that type of form. Right. I'm less likely to do that right now. Maybe if you send me a one-page form that has four or five pieces, Hey, we need these four or five things for basic planning. I'm more likely to do that. Right. Right, right. But the 70 page guide is not going to be helpful for me, you know, in the interest of

Maureen:
Right. Is that to figure that out, do you, how do you do that? Do you trace that customer journey or just conversations

Ed:
Conversations with the customer, but, but, but think it through, but, but here's the really interesting this process, by the way I think I mentioned is called chunking, right? It's it's, it's, it's the artificial breakdown of what could be described in one step into more than one step and it seems to work. So, and you know, it, I don't know. Do you delegate anything more than, do you have delegate stuff occasionally inside your organization sometimes. Right. So this could potentially work for you. So it, again, again, it's, it's not, it's not what do they call it? It's not a Jedi mind trick and it doesn't happen all that all the time, but sometimes if you give some somebody, a two step process, do this, then that it's more likely that they do it. Then if you just give it to them in one step and I found it to be helpful now is it, does it perfect?

Ed:
No, but my observation is that it tends to increase the probability, which is all I'm looking for, right. That, that, that the task will get completed. And you know, this, this works then outside your organization too. So if you, if you, if, if you're delegating tasks, not only internally, but if you're, you're asking a customer to do something, can you make it this, you know, relatively short, not the 70 page form, but a relatively short two-step process for something and experiment with it to see if you, if you find that there's more compliance with it.

Maureen:
Right. I love that. That's great that, that idea of the six white pills and the seventh blue that that's, I love it. That's brilliant. It is incentivizing right. This artificial incentive to get to that blue pill.

Ed:
We've seen a lot of the gamification of stuff. Right. And, and, and the the, the, the, oh my gosh, look, I have an alert on my phone. This there's there's somebody who has, has commented on my Facebook post or my Instagram or, or whatever. I need to go back and see, you know, if they've, if somebody, some, something said something wrong on the internet, I got to correct it. Right. Right.

Maureen:
I was just talking with some folks in the office about these, these virtual races, you know, everyone was used to running races and they no longer exist. So people are running these virtual races and paying a lot of money to just get this metal at the end and pretend that they've run across Europe. So it looks like an interesting innovation in the world of sports. I guess. I don't, I don't even know what it is, but it's

Ed:
Well, they had, they had, they had to innovate around, around these things, you know, and, and there's lots of examples of this and how it's, it's just changed even entire businesses. Here's another good example that we're all familiar with, but, but apple, when it came out with the iPod, they, they priced the original iPod at two and a half times, the price of the nearest competitive device, which I think was this thing called the soundblaster jukebox. So, you know, it was MP3 player a and B, and they're like, well, we'll let, this is crazy. Like w w you, you can't price something at two and a half times the nearest competitor. Oh. And by the way, it came out in October of 2001, 20 years ago, right. After nine 11. Right. Crazy. So, but why was it successful? Well, because apple innovated, not around the technology of the player, it was cool.

Ed:
It did, they did innovate around that and that not only did they innovate there, but they also innovated around the delivery mechanism of the songs, because I don't know if you recall, but back in 2001, the model was, if I heard a song on the radio that I really liked, I would find out what band did it. And it would have to go to the store and buy the CD of that band that had the one song I wanted it. And as it turned out, 12 other crappy songs on it that I didn't like at all. So I spent $20 on, on the CD for the one song. And then we had this other thing competing thing called Napster. I don't know if you remember the original Napster, which was, you know, that unlimited music for free. And it was, and, but the problem was the, the recording industry saw the fact that there were millions of people that wanted billions of their products, right. They, they saw that as a crime wave and literally would prosecute 17 year olds who had a server in their grandmother's basement. That really happened. That's an actual case. Well, we've, you've got millions of people who want millions of your product. And that, that seemed to be going unfulfilled. You don't have a crime wave, you've got a business model problem, and apple solved the business model problem, which was, how about, I just tell you the one song you want for a dollar.

Ed:
And we were all like, well, that makes total sense. I'm, I'm happy to do that. Sure. And I don't even have to go to the store. Yeah, absolutely. Let me buy the one song for a buck. So that's why the iPod was successful. Not necessarily because of the technology, which was cool in and of itself. Right. But it was also because they innovated around the business model of being willing to sell the one song for a dollar. Right.

Maureen:
I don't know if you remember that because single.

Ed:
Oh, sure.

Maureen:
I spent my day, my younger days working in record stores and the cast single always cracked me up because they think it was 4 99 for one song and I had to carry around this plastic silliness.

Ed:
Yeah. But I think

Maureen:
That was the you know, talking about that, that whole business model, if the music industry it's like, they, they had little glimmers of what they were trying to do and it just had totally blown up before it could get anywhere.

Ed:
Yeah. No, the execution was, was definitely lacking, shall we say? But if I could, I, I wanna, I wanna just talk about, you know, maybe take this down a little bit because these are, these are examples of bringing stuff together, but I th I think there's something that's even more simple that organizations can do it. Cause it doesn't have to be even much more than this and that is to, to, to innovate around your, the language that we use. And so let me give you an example, and this is like a very real one for you. And there's, this might be something that, that the sedate society can take advantage of. Do you guys offer training? Do you have the word training on your website at all?

Maureen:
We say learning,

Ed:
Which is good, that's better, or their learning is better or education. Right, right. Right. Because just from a marketing standpoint, what can you charge more for know, training, learning, or education, right.

Maureen:
Absolutely. Training and

Ed:
Yes, exactly. I mean, and even if, you know, at Sage, we tried, I've tried to get people to refer to it, not as product training, but product education. W what, what as a human being, what would you rather, you know, we have potty training, w we have horse training, dog training, you know, horses, dogs, P toddlers are trained adult human beings. We want to be educated. Right. Right. And I think it's, I think that makes, that makes a profound difference for us. You know, w one that this near and dear to my heart, because I do do a lot of stuff on pricing is, is using the word price rather than bill or fee or costs. I mean, nobody likes, I don't like fees. Do you like a fee, like a fee punitive, right. Any fee, I don't want to pay a fee.

Ed:
It, I, you know, and so, so just refer to it as your price. This is our price. It's much more neutral word. It's a, it, it, it, it, and I think it kind, it's a little bit higher value too. But you know, and, and you might've picked up on this, but I, and even with audiences that are primarily professionals, I will insist on using the term customer instead of client. Now, I get a lot of pushback on that. And I, I think that there, there, there are, there are valid defensible positions on the side of why we should continue to call them clients. But one of the reasons why I suggest the change is just because I want to break the mindset of what the old nature of the relationship was, which was very much this once a year break fist fix. In fact, that that that's where the term client comes from.

Ed:
It's, it's, it's based on a Latin word clientele that comes from the same Latin root as the words, incline, decline, and recline. So it's got that angle to it. So inclined decline, recline I'll have that angle. And so the, the client meant originally meant one who liens and they, it was a word used to describe the, the, the people who were served by the lawyers in ancient Rome. Now, lawyers in ancient Rome didn't have, they didn't get paid. It was, it was, if you were accused of a crime or were brought before a court, you were appointed a lawyer and, and lawyers that by definition, they had, they had to, to, to represent whoever it was. Right. and by the way, this is the tie into the Bible is, is Jesus did not get a lawyer, but Paul, I don't know if you're aware of did because he was a Roman citizen.

Ed:
So he gets a real big, because you're a Roman citizen, you get to be defended by a lawyer anyway, that, but th they were one who, so, you know, these are people who were one who leans. They maybe had too much at the Baucus festival and spend too much time, you know, and then did something stupid and they had to be fixed. They had to be, they had to be stood up. They had literally had to be stood back up cause they were leaners. And I think that, that persist to this day in a little bit in the use of the word client, like we, social workers for example, have clients. So that, and that's probably the, the most pure Romanesque sense of the word, right? They, they they've, they've got to be corrected and fixed in some way. Whereas customer is Anglo-Saxon in origin. It means one who's custom. It is it's their custom to come into the store when they were visiting from the country into, into town. So it was their custom. And, and I think that's what we're looking for from a relationship with our, our professionals now is more increased interaction, better relationship, not once a year, we send you the tax planning guide, or once a year, we, we, you know, take your receipts and fix them. But what is more ongoing? We want it to be you're accustomed to engage with us.

Maureen:
Right. Well, it reminds me of what you mentioned earlier with what is the internal procedure versus that external. So internally we have these words, we have these processes, but it might not always translate into that.

Ed:
Yeah. The staff, staff, staff, I hate to say staff sounds like the infection as a, you know, as a staff at Sage we use. And I really liked this term colleagues, right. We're all colleagues. Right. So I, I really, I really appreciate that. That was actually brought, brought in by a former CEO. Who's actually no longer with Sage, but it w that was his word that he insisted on when he came in to everybody needed to refer to one another as colleagues. He much preferred that term. Well, it's kind of stuck.

Maureen:
Yeah. You've given us a lot to think about. Are there any last parting examples that you want to make sure you get in or

Ed:
I, no, I don't want to want to gild the Lily, but I think [inaudible], but let's just, just say that, I think that one of the best things that you can begin to do to begin this cycle of innovation in your organization is to innovate around the language that you use internally. Right. Right. And that doesn't, there's no cost involved in this. Right. There, there can be I've, I've seen firms, so, you know, $5 penalty, if you use the old term or something that goes into a into a square square jar for getting pizza at the end of a month or something. But but, but I, but I think it's important to, to begin to think of what are the, what are these terms that we can begin to innovate around that just make us change our mindset about the way that we behave.

Ed:
There's a great quote about this guy by the name of Werner Earhart, who is the founder of [inaudible]. I don't know if you remember the Este seminar trains. This is from the seventies. If you're a fan of the TV show, the Americans one of the guys in one of the characters in, in this goes, goes to asked Earhart seminar training. It was called EST and Verna Earhart is very real, real person. One of the reasons why he's my hero by the way, is he actually won a tax case against the IRS. So we hope we hold him up in very high esteem. Anyway, he said this, he said, if he says, all change is linguistic, all change is linguistic. If we want to change the, the, the th anything inside the way that we do, we need to change the language that we're using. And I think it's very, very true.

Maureen:
All right. That's that's words matter right. In the very simplest correct. Very simplest way. So, Ed I think last time we chatted, did, were you saying you're a baseball fan?

Ed:
I am huge baseball fan. We are wrapping up the season. Of course, my, my team is the Mets. In fact, I have a, a chat group on Facebook that some of my college friends who are also met fans, we pronounced them dead yesterday, September 9th at 9:47 PM Eastern time for the season, unfortunately. But yes, I do love baseball. My son's a huge baseball player. So I, I do it's it's, it's a hobby and a passion.

Maureen:
All right. Anything special coming up this fall for you all ball? Anything else?

Ed:
Fall ball. Yes. So we got some fall ball starting. In fact, there's a meeting last night. We, we, you know, there's only two months in Texas where you really can't play baseball and that's July and August. I'm actually kidding. And we sadly do play in July and August, but the w in really, it's really December, January, the only times that there's not something going on. So we go through middle the middle of November here in Texas. Awesome.

Maureen:
All right. Well, Ed, thank you so much. You're, you're a great supporter of the society are always welcomed back. So I appreciate all the time you've given us today. So take care.

Ed:
Well, that's great. You know, maybe I'll be a five-time guests one day and I'll get like the green jacket or something.