[00:00:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders to talk about the bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shape their journey.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. A big part of our focus is healthcare, where we work with health tech companies to build secure HIPAA compliant software products. If you like to learn more about us, head over to technologyrivers.com and tell us more about your project.

Today’s lesson from the leap, we are joined by Sherlye Ghillihan, CEO and co-founder of CauseLabs. So Sherlye, welcome to the show. I’ll let you introduce yourself. Let us know where you started, where you are, where you heading. So take your time.

[00:01:11] Sheryle Ghillihan: Thank you, Ghazenfer. So I have been in technology for a pretty long time, primarily because I grew up when you know, people were first getting email addresses and getting onto AOL and learning technology on things like GeoCities and learning how to break sites so that we could build sites. So I’ve been in it for a minute, and even before that I was in computer science classes and AutoCAD classes. Interestingly, despite all of that, I never thought I’d end up in technology.

I thought technology was one of those things, one of those skills that everybody just had to know and so I did not ever aspire to be a business owner or to be a tech company owner for that. So I probably wanted to be something like a teacher as I was growing up, you know, one of those more traditional jobs and my mother probably wanted me to be a doctor, a lawyer or engineer, which is pretty typical of Asian parents.

So I grew up in the Philippines and then moved around quite a bit because my father was in the military, ended up in Fort Worth, Texas. He retired here and met the love of my life here and had our children here. So this is as close to home as it gets for someone whose roots are all over the world.

Starting off in tech I actually was a translator in the military, and then I ended up at a small due diligence, mergers and acquisitions, tech company startup and was with them for several years and then ended up at CauseLabs through an ad on Craigslist, if you can believe it  and my husband found it for me and said, you know, this blends all of your skills.

I think it’d be perfect for you and it ended up being so perfect that several years later we bought the company. So I’ve had a very varied background and I could say that, you know, probably didn’t plan any of it but it’s perfect the way it is.

[00:03:27] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Thanks for sharing that and a good reminder about Craigslist.

I don’t know if that still exists, but there was a time when we all were always on craigslist finding or sharing that was a good time. So, I feel like that’s a change now. Big change. So what was the personal moment or realization that pulled you away from the carpet driven towards the purpose driven work?

[00:03:54] Sheryle Ghillihan: That’s a really great question so as I mentioned, I was dealing with mergers and acquisitions and those never sleep. I mean, I was taking calls in the middle of the night from China and just helping with the due diligence process as well as kind of the organization of the due diligence data rooms and the tech side of that.

So part of it was probably sanity and making sure that I could actually sleep a full night’s sleep and so I do think that it was also shifting my own moral fiber it was kind of shifting and not aligning so well with the values of who I thought I was and who I wanted to be and aspired to be the business world, especially the corporate business world doesn’t always have a lot of empathy and I think it does now more so than it ever has before but the climbing of the corporate ladder and the chasing of titles was really shifting who I was and I think I was raised to do that raised to know that there were always opportunities raised to believe in the American dream.

But the American dream has shifted a lot since technology entered the picture and the world is different now and so I kind of was shaped alongside some of those shifts and recognizing that it could be different. I didn’t recognize it right away because I needed the title and I needed the control and I needed the stability in my income.

But I think it was my husband, actually Michael, who found the job on Craigslist and said this is aligned with everything that you have learned. It was the very first project at CauseLabs was a scripture translation project and so my military experience with translation and understanding cultures was a really important piece of that project.

My faith and everything that I have been raised to believe aligned with that project, my experience with technology aligned with that project. My project management and skills with mergers and acquisitions and due diligence and risk assessment really aligned with that project and so even though it was a demotion entitled to project manager, a pay cut, a huge shift in risk in our life, going with a company that had hundreds of clients to a company that had two.

There was something about it that just really aligned with what I wanted in my life and I don’t know that I questioned it at the end. I questioned it a lot at the beginning and we had multiple interviews ’cause I think I was interviewing them as much as they were interviewing me but by the end.

I was like, I can’t imagine not having this job. They have to hire me and through the work with CauseLabs, we weren’t CauseLabs at the time. I helped the company rebrand, we were High DeF Inc. and High Def Web Solutions before that I think that just the team that we had around us, we had very shared values.

The clients that we had shared values and it was just a recognition that a blueprint of a company could look a little bit different and soon after that we discovered B Lab who does the B Corp certification and our company was headquartered out of Denver and they were headquartered out of Boulder.

And so we got to really experience that locally as an organization and what was happening and moving in Colorado as well as in other states and that picture of what a social enterprise was and what a for-profit for good company was really appealed to me and so I helped the company kind of move in that direction alongside our leadership who was very supportive of it and recognize that this is what we wanted to be as a company.

[00:08:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks for sharing that. So, while we are on CauseLabs, so can you dig a bit more share what CauseLab do currently and then also I can maybe ask separately, but I wanna learn more about the B Corp. Obviously there’s a reason you did it for anybody listening, what are the benefits? Why should a company B Corp?

[00:08:52] Sheryle Ghillihan: Sure. Good question.

[00:08:52] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So let’s divide it into two. Yeah. So let’s go over the list. Absolutely. List in CauseLabs.

[00:08:56] Sheryle Ghillihan: So, Cause Labs is a web agency and of course at the base level, that means that we build websites, we maintain websites, we offer support and strategic advice and guidance on digital technology.

But I would say at its core we are really a strategy company and a steward of someone’s investments. We do work with a lot of nonprofits, which is kind of in our branding, in our name, but that doesn’t mean we only work with nonprofits. We work with corporations for profits, we have enterprise level solutions.

We have primarily been a custom development firm so while in 2003 we started as a website agency by 2008 we had grown into a mobile application builder and then by 2010, 2011, we were doing complex database systems, custom APIs and we have just really evolved as an organization, as technology has evolved by 2015 we stopped doing mobile apps because the majority of people we recognized did not need to invest in a mobile application but certain services do, you know, I expect my healthcare provider, for example, to maybe have a mobile app where I can do some things offline or connect with other applications within their system to get data and reports and log my own things in there.

See my appointments, those sorts of things. I expect my bank to have an app but the local nonprofit that I am interfacing with or maybe a brand that I’m shopping with that I buy things from on a regular basis, I don’t expect them to have an app anymore. I do expect interaction and I think everybody does these days.

Like if a website is just a website sharing their basic business card information, then it’s probably not serving their organization the best way that it can and so to have customers and loyalty, a lot of times these days, it requires interaction and the question is, what is it?

What’s the service that your organization really offers to people and how do you want them interacting with you? The challenge with that sometimes is the expectation from an organization side of like, well, I want to interact with me every single day for eight hours a day. I’m like, no, that’s only your employees that are gonna be in the backend working with your systems.

We do wanna make it easy for them, but most of your customers are going to be reaching out when they need you and so sometimes that’s daily, sometimes that’s weekly. You know, sometimes that’s twice a year and understanding that and giving the right capabilities is an important piece of that and it’s different for every single organization and so when I said we mostly did custom work, it was really understanding those behaviors and nuances and building the right tools so that people didn’t invest in things that weren’t necessary that said the world has changed again just in recent years with the adoption of ai.

And so we’re looking at that evolution too and understanding those behaviors and helping our clients kind of stay ahead of that. I don’t believe that every company’s gonna be an AI company, but I do believe that every, But every company is eventually going to interface with AI in some way and utilize it either internally for their team or externally with their clients.

But understanding that you don’t need all of your clients’ time, all of your clients’ data, you just need. What makes sense for that relationship to be strong and healthy is a big piece of it and part of that being a steward is why we became a B Corp and that aligns very well with, you know, being good for the world, good for the environment, good for the community , and also understanding who you are as a company.

I think that our team being really supportive of it helped us move in that direction because we were already doing the right things. We already had the right values, we were already collecting a lot of information, but becoming B Corp certified it’s harder than you think like there is a lot of accountability, I would say in the certification process, just as any certification HIPAA compliance, for example, there’s a lot of accountability to working on those sorts of projects, as you know I would say that we continue to learn as an organization. The areas in which we want to grow.

And so if somebody is interested in becoming B Corp certified or becoming a public benefit corporation the interest in being a good company is kind of the first step. Learning how to be a better company is kind of the ongoing step. Like we constantly are being evaluated, taking that assessment every three years, measuring our impact and we learn things like, for example woman owned company. My husband and I own it together, but I hold the majority of shares and obviously support other women owned companies in theory. The concept of I support this, I like this but when it came time to making decisions for hiring different vendors, making different purchases, even like where we buy our t-shirt swag we weren’t asking that question of are we hiring women owned companies?

Are we working with women owned developers and designers externally with our company and our measurement was 3% so you can’t improve what you don’t measure and we recognize that even though we support that and we believe in that, we weren’t obviously supporting it with our decisions and so it helped us change, you know, it helped us identify the types of companies that we wanted to working locally and working with organizations that align with the things that we believe in. So becoming a B Corp, the advantages are more internal than they are external. It’s probably good for recruiting and you hire the right people who already align with your values. But very rarely is it a lead magnet?

I would say yes. Generally speaking, most people care now where their dollars are going but they’re not looking on the B Corp site to find a vendor for their website or their web application some are, and we’ve gotten a few inquiries in that, but it’s not the typical lead gen magnet.

[00:16:08] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So many nuggets in just one answer. So starting with the focus part, you are moving away from mobile, obviously companies like ours who focus on that part, obviously those are the ones that come in as a partner, but I think it’s important to figure out what are your core strengths and not going thinner everywhere.

So yeah, you figured that out quickly and that’s natural, everybody wants to do everything because the customers are asked, and we have been asked many times, marketing for example, we build it. Okay. Do you want? Do you do any of that? No, we can, because you can do everything as a technical people.

But are you an expert in that? No and then you touched on the AI part, so that’s another big thing.  We’ll go deeper on that later, but that’s a, I think that’s impacting every business, every company and then I think the benefits of B Corp for sure. So that’s some of the nuggets.

I do agree that many times. It may not be a lead magnet, but there are people who focus on the impact and they only wanna work with you if you are creating, and it’s a win-win situation. So cool. No, thanks for sharing. That’s so glad. So at some stage you acquired a company. So can you talk more about that? What was that? How did that happen? What was that thing?

[00:17:50] Sheryle Ghillihan: So at this point we’ve done two acquisitions. The first acquisition I mentioned earlier, we were, I was a project manager in Cause Labs and eventually grew in that position, ended up on the leadership team and was later asked to be the CEO of the company and the opportunity came up when the owner was ready to sell.

This is the original owner for 2003. I joined the company in 2010 in 2018. He approached me. He was ready to sell the company and for us it was an easy yes. At that point, my husband was already a business owner in the tech space and we have very aligning businesses, the  difference, in fact, he contracted with cause labs for several years.

I think the big difference is he focused mostly on the local organizations and CauseLabs was very much a global organization and a national organization. We’ve done a lot of work all over the world, but we hadn’t done any work locally and so when we acquired CauseLabs as a family he became co-owner with me and the decision came down to which brand is the strongest brand? Do we keep them separate from one another? Do we merge the two organizations together? We ended up merging them because there were enough differences there that we could combine and do those two separate things still and it. 

We decided that CauseLabs had the stronger brand, it had more domain authority, it had more kind of outward news and it was already an established brand that was starting to be recognized. It was even being recognized kind of in the WordPress space, which we did a lot of WordPress work with his agency and so, it was just a decision of how do we structure this as business owners and as a family and then a few years later actually after the pandemic caused a lot of shifts as well, and consumer expectations as well as in technology and there was a bit of disruption there for sure. But a few years after that, we acquired a reporting organization, a reporting plugin and it’s called WP Client Reports and so that has been integrated into cause labs since we were already doing maintenance and ongoing services for our clients. That was just a layer of it was a tool that we were actually using and again, the owner of that was ready to sell and we approached them and asked them if they would consider selling to us.

And so that’s something that we have been building up for several years now. We’ve always wanted to have kind of a product under our umbrella because being just a services company is really challenging but what you were talking about with focus, we’re recognizing it’s really hard to be focused on services and focused on products and so I would say that Michael is kind of the owner of the product side of things. I’m kind of the owner. The services side of things and even now we’re evaluating, what does that structure look like for our family? And are these truly two separate businesses? Did we merge them for convenience and ease?

But they don’t speak the same language, they don’t have the same audience, we’re not doing the same thing. So even though as a product, we utilized it as an agency it’s not something that made a lot of sense necessarily to a lot of our clients. It’s just, it’s an add-on for our clients, which is a nice add-on to have.

But it’s not necessarily the same pipeline that we’re looking at. So from a structural perspective, those are things we’re always evaluating but from a service perspective. I think they align so well because it’s just another layer, you know, just like AI is going to become another layer.

We’re eventually going to have to decide, what are the layers that make sense and what are the layers that don’t, and we’re just looking at our clients right now to see like, where is the world going? You know, where are their services going? Where are their expectations going? but acquiring a business and maybe it’s because I came from the mergers and acquisitions industry.

I’ve found it kind of simple. I know it’s complex and there’s a lot that goes into it, but maybe I’ve just gotten really lucky with the acquisitions that we’ve done that we are already very close and it was very partner oriented and not quite a private equity deal or something like that.

[00:22:56] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. I think coming back to it, that’s a focus part, you are right, we struggled before starting this business. I know when you’re doing services and products together, totally different types of businesses. Selling is different. Everything is different. So I’m glad you figured out, Okay Two separate divisions, or two separate departments, two separate companies, probably each has its own KPIs. 

When it comes under one, suddenly the resource starts sharing and then the product is the one that usually gets heard because services take priority and that’s a common pattern that we see.

I was listening to one of my early talks that I listened during the COVID was. I think the guy who wrote that once, one step, I believe I forgot the name now but the focus, the key part was like you wanna do one thing at a time and he gives some number. Like if you reach at this until you reach certain millions, you don’t want to start two things, otherwise you will have a struggle.

[00:24:05] Sheryle Ghillihan: That’s really interesting because you look at as a business owner and I was a fairly new business owner even though my husband already had his business, I was a new business owner when we acquired CauseLabs. I had already been in CauseLabs for so many years by the time we acquired it, but I was a new business owner and it’s interesting how much my mindset has shifted being a business owner, even from being a CEO to a business owner.

It’s totally different and you, the models that we have for business ownership are these large companies that have so many different divisions under them, so many different products, so many different services, and you don’t think about the fact that they didn’t have all those things from the beginning.

And you may have experienced this in developing apps. Organizations that come to us and they say, well, what I want to build is like reinventing Facebook. Let’s say, you know, I want all of these different things and people are going to use it because people use Facebook. So we expect them to use what we are building and the reality is Facebook started with one thing. One core thing that it did and you have to make it so easy that you build brand loyalty and you do one thing really well, and then you layer things on and people adapt their behavior and start to use all the things that you offer to them.

3M didn’t start with the number of patents that they have now. You know, they didn’t start with all of the different service lines that they have and so, I don’t think, I mean, as business owners, we think we have to do all the things as organizations that come to us and want to build technology, they think they want all of the things and the same concept is true. Start with one thing.

[00:26:02] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Right. We hear the same thing. Like they want everything we tell them, pick one thing that would become your MVP, because if you make MVP. It’s big, it’s no longer an MVP. You are, you want to build a whole competition against the whole product that was built in years.

Right. So I do remember the name of the book that I said incorrectly, but it’s  “One Thing by J.Papason”. So, he spoke to our chapter as well.

[00:26:35] Sheryle Ghillihan: I don’t think I’ve read that one. I’ll have to read it. 

[00:26:38] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thank you. It’s a really good book. So you’ve worn so many hats in your life. Designer, soldier, executive, business owner, strategist, board member, community builders, there’s so many. So, but when you zoom out, what is that one thread that ties all of these chapters together?

[00:27:00] Sheryle Ghillihan: That’s a good question. I think that’s an evolving thread, initially I think it was kind of my military upbringing of the world is full of opportunities to bring people together and so I think that’s why I ended up in translation. I ended up in the military specifically. I ended up being a soldier specifically because I wanted to be a translator.

I actually walked into multiple recruiters offices before I chose the Army. Primarily because the Army said, well, we can guarantee that job for you, they wrote it into my contract. However, it’s always needs of the army and I had to pass multiple tests. It turns out I was able to pass it.

I had the capacity and the capabilities for it. But, I think that my goal there was just to be a better communicator and to bridge gaps between people and I think that is probably part of my history as being an immigrant being a little bit different, traveling around the world seeing different perspectives.

Bringing people together was always really important for me. When I ended up in mergers and acquisitions, I don’t wanna say that I was at a stage of accepting any job. The position that I got was primarily because I had been a stay-at-home mom for seven years and it was really hard to get back into the workforce when my resume only had volunteer work on it.

And I had a woman at church, Karen, who trusted me and gave me a chance, gave me an opportunity and I remember in the interview speaking with her saying, well, I work 40 hours a week for free for nonprofit organizations. What do you think my work ethic is when I’m actually getting paid? and I think that’s why I succeeded in that company and kind of thrived in that environment.

But, I don’t know that I had any specific intention when I took that job, other than I need stability for my family. I need something that will allow my husband to explore his new opportunities as he’s getting out of the military and that will still sustain my family and give them a better life than I had when I was growing up.

When I got into CauseLabs, it was the first decision that I had made that was really, truly purpose-driven and it came back around to that communicating with people, bringing people together and leveraging technology. This is where the evolution of my thinking came in, recognizing that technology had a lot of potential.

When I got into it, it was kind of in the day and age of Congress really bringing the hammer down on tech companies because of all the negative consequences of social media and technology, all of the privacy issues that we’re having with technology and yes, all those risks exist, but there’s always a silver lining to it too. There’s so much good potential in technology and this is the reason you and I are friends because our companies are the same in that we find that good potential and we use technology for good. It’s important because it is a part of our world these days and we can use it to harm people or we can use it to help people.

And I think it matters who you are as a company on whether or not you’re gonna harm or help, some companies don’t care and they’re just going to build whatever you tell them to build, and they don’t have, not that they don’t have a conscience, but that’s not their responsibility to guide you as a business towards something better to recognize that there are risks involved with collecting certain information.

But if you find the right partner. You find the right company, they’re gonna help guide your organization through some of these technology shifts and some of these risks.

[00:31:28] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Thank you. I hear you talking about technology surveying people’s roads and the other way around.

So thanks for sharing that and I’ll add one word. One more towards your, the third question that I ask that’s impact. I personally see that everything you are doing is creating an impact, whether it’s on the military or helping on a strategic side, you are creating a big impact on people’s lives.

So thank you for that. So continue with this last comment that you made. So many founders, many people struggle to align personal values with the business goals. How do you coach people to break that gap?

[00:32:18] Sheryle Ghillihan: So I’m an EO member and I know you are too. I’ve been a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization for about seven years now.

And I’ve learned being a member of EO that business is never separate from personal and family. As a business owner, our business touches every part of our lives, but also every part of our lives touches our business and it’s this holistic picture and you can’t really silo them without something suffering.

I think that’s some awareness that I have gained in becoming a business owner. But not everybody has that big picture. Of course, if they believe in integrity, they’re probably going to have be a leader that has integrity and possibly expect integrity but if they’ve never set that core value, then they’re not making decisions based on that.

They’re not hiring and firing based on that there is a lot that our personal values come into the culture of our organization just naturally but the nature of business is still economic and so sometimes it can shift our mindset and I think that’s what I saw when I was in mergers and acquisitions when I was in due diligence, it was being too detached from the impact, it can shift your mindset. I think that’s why I love the work that I do now is because we aren’t on the services side of things, we aren’t just coding or designing what people tell us to build. We get to understand why they’re building it.

we get to understand who’s using it, we get to help guide the direction of how they’re going to use it and how this is going to help and we get to co-create that selling products for me has always felt very detached from that, and it’s harder to infuse. Our values into that I have learned from being a B Corp that there are organizations that do that.

So for example, Ben and Jerry’s is an organization that sells ice cream, but you know what their values are because the names of their ice cream actually shouted at you? There’s a lot of decisions that they make as a company that align with their values. I don’t think that every company is that transparent.

But when you build your brand around that it makes a difference in how the world sees you.

[00:35:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Thanks for sharing. So you worked on many projects that impacted millions of people. Can you share a project or a feel moment anonymously, obviously that made you think, this is why we do what we do.

[00:35:38] Sheryle Ghillihan: Almost every single project has that moment and I tend to surface that moment with the teams when we do our state of the labs, our quarterly or annual reviews, I ask the team to share their moments that they’ve had partly because the work that we do is hard and any work than anybody does, you know, it’s hard, it’s easy to be detached from that impact but when you find it, it’s so important to voice that out loud. It’s so important to say, this is why we do what we do. We could be frustrated that they didn’t answer an email for five days or that they went radio silent. We can be frustrated if a team member or ourselves has missed the mark on something.

There can be a lot of things during a project that happen that are just challenges we have to overcome, but when you get to see the impact, when you get to experience it and say, this is why we do what we do, it’s so amazing. There’s one project that we did in Vietnam and it was kind of an R&D project.

It was very challenging to identify the levers that we could pull to really work in rural regions with all of the complexities and at this point in time, the limitations of technology but when it actually worked it ended up that we were able to support a project and support a funding campaign that funded over 10,000 sanitation spaces on latrines for rural homes in Vietnam across multiple provinces.

And I mean, that’s a huge number if you think about, these were domiciles that didn’t have clean water and plumbing and proper hygiene and that impacts health, that impacts dignity, that impacts so much in those communities and in those families and despite, you know, the challenges with code and limitations of the internet and all of these other things, at the end of that, you can say, this is why we do what we do and it’s just amazing to be able to look back on that and say, I don’t know what’s happened with those families, but I know that they’re better for it.

[00:38:27] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks for sharing. Really appreciate that. So, Ai, so let’s start with how are you using AI in your business?

[00:38:38] Sheryle Ghillihan: I use it every day. I use it in business. I use it in person. We have been using AI long before the surge of AI actually came about. You know we’ve been using Ai for image recognition.

We’ve been using it for generating alt text. We’ve been using it for challenge based learning management system projects, so there’s ways in which we’ve been using AI before this generative AI boom kind of started 2020 to 2023. Now what people expect of AI is different than how we were using it before.

I mean, interestingly, people. The general public believes that AI is this new thing, and yet those that have been in machine learning and in the AI space for a couple of decades now recognize there’s nothing new about this  is just the new evolution and there have been a few companies that have made it, you know, widely accessible to the general public.

You no longer have to be a senior devOps person to deploy this, you no longer have to be a master developer to utilize these systems. Since that’s happened, I’ve learned something new every day. I’m always reading a newsletter about ai. I am testing things. I have adopted AI in a lot of my marketing and a lot of my personal projects that I’m doing as an organization, we’re using AI to vet some of our leads. So some of the things that come in it can automatically check things like size of organization, capacity to build something custom alignment with using one of our products. Those are things that we’ve done externally as far as deploying it for clients.

We haven’t jumped on that bandwagon other than yes, we can give you the capacity to add AI to your web applications, to your web tools but we’re not building as some companies are kind of custom AI funnels right now and part of that is what I was mentioning earlier about it’s changing behavior.

We don’t quite know yet where the right investment should be. I think that the majority of the large organizations are going to be building AI into everything. So for example, two years ago, AI could help you summarize your emails, but only if you use their API and built this custom version of it.

Right? Today your Gmail is being summarized by Gemini. You could just click the little diamond arrow, you know, icon. Everything’s going to get built in eventually, and it’s going to be a big part of the systems that we use every single day. We don’t have to necessarily build custom systems, there’s caveats to that, of course similar to, I said earlier, we’re not going to build a mobile application for everybody because not everybody needs a mobile application. Not everybody can maintain a mobile application across two different platforms and they don’t necessarily recognize that they don’t need it yet, the same with ai.

Not everybody needs to build a custom AI platform. It is important to recognize it as a business. Where it can be leveraged and what exists out there that can be utilized and what are the custom things that are unique and specific to you? Like proprietary knowledge, proprietary processes make sense to build custom in that instance but the general things, like I want something that automatically creates content for me. Well just connect it with Zapier, connect it with, make, use those automated workflows that already exist. Things are going, I mean, WordPress is already building in AI to where you can do things automatically. So those things are going to happen naturally.

[00:43:16] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Have you seen noticed any resistance from your employees or from clients in terms of leveraging AI because not everybody’s on board or everybody thinks it’s not mature or it’s not secure. All those reasons we do here at different places. What resistance do you see in your company or with your clients?

[00:43:42] Sheryle Ghillihan: So the majority of companies that have asked us questions about Ai. We have said, well, we can do training for your team, because I think it’s important for the team to get on board with this kind of transformation.

Because if you are going to build AI, if you are going to build custom, or if you are going to adopt this as a more automated way to build out your processes, I believe a team should be involved in that one, two comfort them that this is not necessarily going to replace them, it’s going to enhance their capacity and capability.

But two, so that they understand the trajectory of where the company is going and the transformation that’s happening and they honestly have the best ideas and the best awareness of the potential risks involved because they know the business. I run into people saying, well, my team’s not going to use it.

They’re not ready or they’re scared or they’re Luddites, they’re just not tech savvy enough and I’ve tried to explain that it doesn’t matter if they themselves are going to be utilizing the technology. I believe that they need to understand what’s coming and how technology is going to change the company and shift their processes and the things, their expectations, and the things that they’re going to be doing.

So that’s one challenge that I’ve run into is that I think leaders are ready, they do not believe their team has the capacity and so that’s a challenge because you can’t evolve as an organization if you don’t get your team on board. The other challenge that I’ve dealt with is people asking me, well, is that safe?

I mean, is technology safe? To some degree, yes. You have to put measures around it. You have to put parameters. You have to be aware of the data that you’re collecting. You have to have parameters for compliance. You have to assess the risks. You have to, I mean, all of those things have always mattered with technology.

AI is as safe as any other system that you’re going to be interfacing with. It comes down to education of how you use it and the system that you build and the partners that you have in supporting you on that , you know. I have said to people, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a tech company or any company these days, you should have cyber insurance.

It doesn’t matter what kind of company you are, you should have cyber insurance because all of our companies touch technology to some degree at this day and age.

[00:46:43] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yes. I think the important part is it’s going to change whether you like it or not. There’s no point of closing your eyes.

Things will go, it’s gonna just crush you. I tell my team story about the blockbuster babies are us toys us. Not everybody remembers, like some are younger kids, I tell, but in our age. So like those are more of our arrogance. Okay. Nothing is gonna change so nobody can change us. This is how we do it.

And then suddenly. So now AI is going to change. So your jobs are going to be impacted whether you like it or not. So you have a chance either to close your eyes or wait for that, or you get ready to compete and that’s the decision we made as a company that no, we are not gonna sit back. We will invest, we will build our team, our capabilities, our tech, whatever, to get to the level so that we can compete and in effect be ahead of others. So that’s the mission and we made it very simple. Actually, we just started doing once a week, all hands meeting, and we defined everybody’s goal. Everybody puts their own goals, quarterly goals, and then the task, like what they’ll achieve and they will share something every week.

So gradually, once people started seeing that AI is actually not going to replace, but it’s empowering them. Then that mindset changed because initial thinking is AI is gonna change, and they have a resistance. Once you start seeing, it’s not going to change, it’s actually letting me do more work.

Now there is something, I was supposed to do 10 things and I was always doing four or five. Now I can do 10. Great now, because companies always have higher KPIs most of the time, and now you have, are able to achieve those KPIs. So I mean, I look at it, it’s an exciting time. It’s scary as well, but I think it is the need of the time.Okay.

[00:49:01] Sheryle Ghillihan: I think the other reason that we were early adopters was because we’re raised in a generation where we adopted new things. I mean, we did transition from BHS to DVD to streaming technology. Right. So, personally speaking, when you mentioned Blockbuster, I thought of that, but also from an industry perspective.

If you’ve been in design or you’ve been in technology for a while, we have transitioned to different coding methodologies, different languages. Like we’re not coding in basic anymore. You know and so we’ve seen the evolution of things so much so, and it has impacted our industry so much that I think it’s easy to become an early adopter of something like AI and not be scared of it.

We recognize the huge transformation that’s happening right now. You’re right. It’s not going away. We cannot put our head in the sand but we do have to identify as an organization the different ways that we are going to leverage it or interface with it. Is it capacity building for our teams or is it capacity building for our clients?

Is it both? I think there’s a huge opportunity right now for people who are in tech, but I think there’s also a huge resistance right now for some companies that are in tech because it’s very easy for me to say, well, but that’s not the right way to do it. AI didn’t quite get that right, but you don’t know as a lay user who doesn’t use tech every single day that’s eventually going to break or that’s going to be a security risk, you know? There is an acceptance right now of what people are willing to run with, even though it’s not the right way, so we’re kind of on that bridge right now of understanding where our skills are needed.

[00:51:11] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So we’re out of time, but I’ll ask two questions each. So just tell us about your book. I give you this opportunity to more like the world we know.

[00:51:26] Sheryle Ghillihan: So the world we know was supposed to initially be a business book. I believe you said you interviewed Don Williams also on your podcast. 

He was my writing coach  and he really taught me how to self-publish a book. He said, start with your business book first. It’ll give you credibility. It’ll be good for both your personal brand and your company brand and I said, okay. So I started working on a business book but you know, just the seasons of life. I think that what happened was I eventually ended up writing a book on perspective and the reality of how the world is shaped around us, both from our experiences and what we’re fed in social media or on the news, and it’s just a book on perspective.

I wrote it more for myself than for anybody else, but I finally clicked, published and put it out there for the world.

[00:52:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. Thanks. What’s next for CauseLabs and what’s next for you? Any plans that you can share?

[00:52:29] Sheryle Ghillihan: Absolutely. So what’s next for CauseLabs is really identifying what are the services that we can offer that are still relevant, especially as businesses are exploring AI.

And like I said, that’s probably more on the strategic side right now and helping them steward their investments, we are very much a savvy R&D team and can help with those thing and so we’re exploring that and exploring with our clients how behavior is changing and what their customers really need in the future.

And on the personal side of things I’m writing another book. I don’t wanna share too much on that yet. I’m just in the beginning stages of that and I’m doing a lot more speaking, so coming on podcasts like this, but then also just traveling more and speaking on different stages and sharing kinda the experience that I’ve had and where I’ve seen technology shift and change and where I think it’s going.

[00:53:27] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Congratulations on the second book.

[00:53:30] Sheryle Ghillihan: Thank you. 

[00:53:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks Sheryle. Thanks for sharing all these nuggets. So before we leave, can you share for our listeners where people can find you if they wanna contact you for anything.

[00:53:49] Sheryle Ghillihan: Absolutely, of course they can find me at Causelabs, C-A-U-S-E-L-A-B-S.com.

So that is where they can find all of our services and different products related to technology. But then also I’ve got a personal website, sherylegillihan.com. That’s S-H-E-R-Y-L-E-G-I-L-L-I-H-A-N and I have a lot of my speaking content on there, some of my resources and blog posts as well as some AI experiments that I’ve been doing kind of on the side that I make freely available to people.

[00:54:24] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Cool. We’ll be sure to add these links in the podcast description.

[00:54:30] Sheryle Ghillihan: Wonderful.

[00:54:30] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks a lot, Sheryle again, it was so good to have you. Thanks for sharing all these golden nuggets to our listeners. Thanks everyone for listening to lessons from the Leap. Thanks.