Innovating Software Systems With Ghazenfer Mansoor

[00:00:00] Outro: Welcome to the Systems Simplified podcast, where we feature top leaders who share stories on how to successfully systemize a business. Now, let’s get started with the show.

[00:00:16] Adi Klevit: Hello, Adi Klevit here, the host of the Systems Simplified podcast, where I feature top founders, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders about systematizing a business. Today’s episode is being brought to you by the Business Success Consulting Group, where we create, document, optimize, and implement processes and procedures so businesses can grow and thrive. And today’s guest is Ghazenfer Mansoor. Hi, Ghazenfer.

[00:00:50] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Hi, Adi. Nice to have you here. How are you? I’m pretty good. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:56] Adi Klevit: Yeah, thank you very much for being a guest. So Ghazenfer, you have quite a bio. I’m going to have you introduce some of it, but I’m going to do the overall introduction. So you are a software engineer by trade, right? And you have a software development firm that works with entrepreneurs to bring solutions to automation, to workflows, and you work with the entrepreneurial community in order to make their business more productive and more efficient. I know there is more to the story. You are originally from Pakistan, and you came to the United States in 1999, and now you reside in Virginia. Have a very successful company. So tell me more, tell the listeners more about yourself, about your story. How did you get to where you are today?

[00:01:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. Yeah, thanks, Adi. Thanks for having me. So yeah, as you mentioned, I grew up in Pakistan. I did my early education in Pakistan. I got my degree, and in 1999 I moved to the United States. It was a .com time. I learned Java in my university project, so that was very demanding and that helped me get to the United States. And then as I joined different companies, worked on different projects, smaller and bigger companies, I experimented with many different things.

I worked with two startups as an early engineer. I worked with government contracting companies like Veterans Affairs, EPA. I worked on some corporate projects. So I learned the different flavors, and that helped me understand the business and approaches that companies and people are using in building these products, and that also became the basis of my own business. So along the way, I also had a recruitment software startup, and that also gave me a more understanding of how the products are built. And in 2015 I started this business.

[00:03:18] Adi Klevit: Okay. What inspired you to start your business?

[00:03:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Looking back, many times you cannot connect the dots looking forward. Looking back, I think I could come up with many different reasons. I think the bigger one for me was the flexibility and independence. Obviously it comes with its own challenges, but flexibility was the biggest thing for me. I wanted to have my own schedule. I wanted to be able to attend, for example, my kids’ back to school nights and all the other activities. But when you’re working for somebody, that is very limiting. Money is also the factor many times. When you have full control, you can grow the businesses to any limits. Obviously the sky is the limit, and you’re not being controlled by whatever the limits that are being defined many times by the employers.

[00:04:20] Adi Klevit: Absolutely. I agree. Okay, so you specialize in developing custom software basically for businesses, for entrepreneurs.

[00:04:32] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Right.

[00:04:34] Adi Klevit: And, you know, this is a question that I’m sure a lot of our listeners have: when should they develop their own software, and when should they actually use off-the-shelf solutions?

[00:04:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Okay. So there is no easy answer. It’s like many things: do you buy your own thing, or do you pick up an existing one? You have to customize it. There are many challenges, pros, and cons on either approach. So the way we look at it, we always say thrive with something that you have, because you don’t want to be building something that already exists. And then once you’re using it and you get to a stage where the software is not fulfilling your need, that may be the time.

Secondly, it also depends on your goal. It depends on the direction you want to go, because there are times when competing software exists, or there are others that you could use, but is it giving you a benefit in your business? For example, we work with service businesses, helping them improve their operations through AI and technology. We help them get to 10X in their businesses. Most service businesses’ valuations are very low, like 1X, 2X, 3X, and there are certain times it could be higher. But in most cases, the values are very low of the EBITDA. Now you don’t have tech in it. So if you have IP, if you have defensible IP, suddenly that could be 15X, 20X, 30X. Because then you can bring efficiencies, and you can be pretty big. So that’s how you can do 10X in your business. So many times, the tools already exist.

There are many other tools, but what can you do that can bring efficiency? So the specific goals also matter. Sometimes people will look at it like, “Yes, I want to solve my own problem, but I want to productize it and solve this for others as well.” When I first worked on that recruitment software, there were existing tools that were available, but they may not be right for certain types of companies.

They may also bring some complications, and sometimes they get too expensive to the level that you want. So there are probably hundreds of reasons people want to build their own things.

[00:07:07] Adi Klevit: Right. So if you had to summarize, or let’s talk about the main pros and cons of having your own software: what would you say are the pros of creating customized software for your business? What would you say are the advantages or the pros?

[00:07:29] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The biggest advantage is the IP, the asset. Now you have your own tech which you own, and the valuation of that is pretty high, so that increases the value of your business. Second, you get control. You can build the features that you want or that your customers are asking for. You have to look at your workflows. Which of the workflows are costing you a lot?

Let’s say for a certain type of stuff, you may have a lot of people that may be needed to do a certain job, and that’s costing you a lot. There are certain things that maybe once a year or once every other year, you don’t care even if it’s costing you a lot. But is it being repeated? Anything that you have to do multiple times, that’s repetitive stuff. Anything that you have to do again and again and do in a costly way, obviously that’s costing you. 

So wherever you can optimize, do it. When you’re working with existing software, the priorities may be different because those features may not be available. We come across this all the time. Even with the tools that we are using, many times we are requesting certain features. But they say, “Well, this is a great feature, but it’s not in our product because not every customer is asking for it.” So having your own would give you a lot more control on the software.

[00:09:08] Adi Klevit: Got it. So those are some of the advantages. What are the disadvantages or the challenges that people should be aware of when they are looking at getting their own software?

[00:09:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The cost is a big one. Software development is not easy. The cost is pretty high. And then not everybody knows how to build the product, so you could go in the wrong direction. You may be building things that you may not be using that often. So it’s complicated. Knowing how to build the product is key, having the right people, and obviously the cost is big.

Gradually, it can add up. So you have to look at your ROI and how this software can bring efficiency to your processes. Sometimes, even though the outside software may not be doing everything, from a cost perspective it does make sense because it’s not always feasible to build your own product. The bottom line is you have to look at the ROI.

[00:10:15] Adi Klevit: Absolutely. So are there any other considerations or disadvantages that you see, or that somebody needs to know about when they decide on their own software?

[00:10:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah. So the way we look at it, we don’t look at it as whether somebody should be building their own versus picking up the existing, because that may even be the wrong direction to start with. Usually we look at what exactly the problem is and what the pain point is. Maybe the pain point could be solved by using existing software and gradually doing integrations. I’ll give you an example: there are a lot of tools for project management, like monday.com, Jira, and all of those.

[00:11:03] Ghazenfer Mansoor: A lot of those have APIs as well. So let’s say if you’re solving a certain problem, you may use their API to extract some data and create a dashboard. For example, you may have a lot of customers and you want to create a customer dashboard to show data pulled from all these different tools. There are dashboarding tools as well, but just for the sake of this example, let’s assume you need to pull data from 20 different places and do some activity.

You could be building one tool that pulls the data and pushes it into these different systems, so you’re not building the whole thing. And then you gradually see that you’re getting to a state where you can’t solve one specific issue, so now you may need to build just one custom piece. Gradually, you build one piece at a time. You don’t want to be building the whole system at once and make it a big, complicated system that may become obsolete by the time you finish it. Things are changing so quickly, and new things are coming. So many times integration is key, and many projects are actually going to be good just by doing the integration.

[00:12:18] Adi Klevit: Right. So you’re basically saying take something like monday.com, integrate it with another software that you are using to manage the business, integrate it with some spreadsheets where you keep data, maybe with your CRM, and just make sure that everything integrates together.

[00:12:37] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yes. A lot of people don’t know the product development part, so many times requirements are not clear. The first step is you have to start using something so that at least you can start getting clarity on what you want. Once you define everything, you might say, “Well, now I cannot get this X thing done.” But do you really need to build custom software just for that one thing? It depends on the goal and the specific direction you want to go. Certain things are good with just integration; certain things may or may not be.

[00:13:14] Adi Klevit: Good. So you help companies decide what integrations they need, if they need integrations.

[00:13:21] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, absolutely. The key part for us is solving the problem. It’s not just about building because developers love to build. If you tell them you want to build a specialized or different type of calendar, developers can always build it. As long as it’s technically possible, they love to build it. But it might take two months to build that specialized calendar. What if 80% of that could be done using an existing approach? The ROI might be better using that 80% in a different way rather than building a custom one. So we look at what specific problem exists and how we can solve that problem.

[00:14:06] Adi Klevit: Makes sense. It totally makes sense. Give us some examples of specific problems that you helped solve for other companies.

[00:14:16] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I’ll give some high-level problems. We work a lot with healthcare, which is the majority of our business helping healthcare companies improve their operations. In one case, we’re working with a company that works with Medicaid. Medicaid has very complicated rules when it comes to billing and how services are being used. There are a lot of audits and compliance requirements. Wherever there are compliance requirements, you have to maintain a lot of different paperwork and details, and especially when it comes to patient data, you also have HIPAA-related compliance.

If you look at existing tools, you’re not going to find anything suitable because existing tools are probably doing broader things. They could have HIPAA compliance, but that is more from their perspective, maybe just storage encryption. It’s way more than just encryption or data storage. In order to solve those compliance problems, we helped this company build a custom tool to improve their operations.

That included the log notes, treatment plans, auditing, and the whole workflow from when you onboard a customer up until you get paid or finish business with that customer. There are a lot of complicated workflows, because if you’re doing it wrong, you’re not going to get paid from Medicaid.

In another case, it’s remote patient monitoring. You’re collecting data for patients through cellular devices like scales and blood pressure monitors. All those entries are pushed to the cloud, and doctors can see them. Once doctors look at it, they can not only review the data, but they can also bill, which increases reimbursement for those doctors and creates another revenue avenue for the providers. So there are many different use cases like that.

[00:16:38] Adi Klevit: Excellent. Now, you’re also in the process of writing a book.

[00:16:44] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yep.

[00:16:45] Adi Klevit: What is your book about?

[00:16:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I’ll go back to give you the background of why I’m writing a book. I came to the United States in ’99. In 2000, I joined a company in Virginia, and they got a project from a European telecom, Sceneris, to build wireless communities. That was 2000. Remember the phones back then? They were very tiny, limited Nokia phones. You could do certain things, but even at that time, we built that community. Based on that, they saw the opportunity and created a wireless accelerator group that became another wireless startup to build and manage mobile apps.

Along the way, we built an app for Palm to control home appliances through your Palm device. Palm is not around anymore, I don’t know if you remember Palm devices. There were a lot of experiments. That was the early part, before the iPhone. It was an interesting time.

I got involved in mobile pretty early. We built a mobile platform that would do something like BlackBerry Enterprise Server or the Apple App Store with permissions and all of those things. We did that in the early 2000s. But the devices were not ready. If you don’t have a carrier on board, it’s not easy to penetrate the mobile market.

At that time, you were building software, but if AT&T or Verizon wasn’t taking you, it was really hard to succeed. Obviously, Apple solved that problem not only with a great product, but also with their approach. When the iPhone launched, AT&T was the first carrier, which is where AT&T went up high in terms of market share.  As the iPhone and Android came out, my involvement in mobile continued to increase because I had started long ago. So that’s how we got more into mobile. When we started this business in 2015, we started as a mobile app development company.

We did a lot of mobile applications. In the last 20 years, I learned a lot on the mobile side, and that became the basis of this book. The book title is Free App Promotion: Different Strategies to Outgrow Your Mobile App. It’s not just about building an app, but how you build an app so that it scales.

It talks about building the right app and how to market it, covering all the different strategies that could be used.

[00:19:47] Adi Klevit: Interesting. I know that’s definitely a topic that is very important to know about because we all have ideas for apps and want to create apps. I think that will be great. I’m looking forward to reading that book and getting more data. So Ghazenfer, if people want to learn more about you or get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do it?

[00:20:11] Ghazenfer Mansoor: On my website, technologyrivers.com. You can share the link afterward, but you can see it in my background as well. Technologyrivers.com. There is a lot of information there where you can find out what we do, what kind of services we offer, and the projects we have done. Our customers are talking about us, so pretty much all the details are there. I can also share the link to my URL. My name is difficult, but at the same time it’s easy. The benefit is if you search my name, you’ll only find one.

[00:20:48] Adi Klevit: That’s definitely an advantage. The same with me, so I understand. Well, Ghazenfer, it’s been a pleasure having you here on this podcast to discuss technology and the advantages and disadvantages of having your own custom software. You gave us very good information, so thank you so much for being a guest.

[00:21:10] Ghazenfer Mansoor: No problem. Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to have been here.

[00:21:20] Outro: Thanks for listening to the Systems Simplified podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.