IAM682- Founder Helps Companies Add To Their IT of Software Teams

David Moise is the president and founder of Decide Consulting, an IT staffing and recruiting company based in Houston, TX. Prior to starting Decide Consulting, he had a career as a software developer holding titles such as technical architect and practice manager. In an industry dominated by companies run by recruiters and sales, Decide is different by having a technologist running the company.

• CEO Hack: (1) Automation – Zapier, If This Then(IFTT) and Microsoft Power Automate (2) Book- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• CEO Nugget: Establish core values
• CEO Defined: Getting people that fit into your tribe for mutual benefit

Website: https://decideconsulting.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/decideconsultng
https://twitter.com/dcmoise

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/decide-consulting
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmoise

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Transcription

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[00:00:02.20] – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, start-ups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I am CEO CEO podcast.

[00:00:30.10] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have David Moyes of Decide Consulting. David, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:38.89] – David Moise

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:40.60] – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more David so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. David is the president and founder of Decide Consulting, an IT staffing and recruiting company based in Houston, Texas. Prior to starting Decide Consulting, he had a career as a software developer holding titles such as a technical architect and practice manager. In an industry dominated by companies run by recruiters and sales, decisions are different by having a technologist running the company. David, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:11.50] – David Moise

Yes. I am. Let's go.

[00:01:13.00] – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it. Let's make it happen. So to to kinda jump right in, I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story, how you got started with your business, and all the awesome things you guys are doing.

[00:01:22.00] – David Moise

Okay. So right out of college, way back when, started working for one of the big four consulting companies, just as a staff person doing programming projects, worked there for several years, left there to take more money at another IT consulting company, and did that a few times. And some trends happened in all these companies. I was the person who was, going out on sales calls with the salespeople, helping them close deals. I was writing the proposals. I was, if a project was going sideways, they'd stick me on it and I'd make it better. They were trying to hire people and wanted someone to do some technical interviewing. They were calling me to do that, and they kept on doing that. And what I realized at the time was I was making a lot of money for a lot of other people, and maybe I should do that for myself. So decided to start it that way.

At the time, there was some new technology that was coming out, and I was an early adopter of it, and decided really start off as just a software project development company, doing custom software development. And that was great. We had several several good years with that. The issue was that I eventually wound up burning the candle at both ends. I'm doing the work. I'm hiring people. I'm doing sales. I'm trying to do marketing. I was taking care of my clients, but not building as fast as I could have. And then two thousand eight happened, and, all of a sudden, our pipeline just dried up and a lot of projects that we had where we thought they're gonna go on longer, they dried up, and we definitely shrunk.

And coming out of that, it was, you know, some decisions that we had to make. Do we wanna keep on going with this custom software development? But what I realized was, you know, when the phone rings, we're getting a lot more people asking us for, I need a program or I need a network engineer. And we just shifted to, let's just focus on the staffing and recruiting components of the company. It's easier to find salespeople to do that. Selling software projects is very abstract for a lot of salespeople, so we've just been focusing on that for several years now and, doing well. So there we go.

[00:03:39.80] – Gresham Harkless

Nice. No. I definitely appreciate that. I know, you know, obviously, that was a difficult time, but I think some of the things that I've read and even it sounds like you you've experienced as well too is there's often sometimes tremendous opportunities that come out of, you know, things or, I guess, economic changes that are happening. And a lot of times, it opens up opportunities. It forces us a lot of times to think more creatively about things, and you see in those trends and those trends over time, being able to kinda make that pivot just because you already knew that people were asking on that is incredible foresight.

[00:04:09.90] – David Moise

Speaking of, we're in the middle of one right now. That's right. So we are doing this in the middle of the COVID lockdown, and, it's gonna be a very different world when we come out of this. And hopefully, we're trying to prepare ourselves for that.

[00:04:23.30] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's one of those kind of quote-unquote muscles that is always great to have and to know that there are opportunities to be able to see those opportunities, to be able to pivot and understand, you know, there will always kinda be, you know, things that happen, you know, economically and changes in the world. But the muscle that you probably need maybe the most is probably that ability to kinda see and be able to make those pivots and changes. So it's great you've been able to do that. Yeah. And a reminder for us to do that as well. So, I know we touched on a little bit when I read your bio when you talked about your story. Could you take us through exactly, you know, how you work with clients, some of those things that you provide, and how exactly that process goes?

[00:05:00.10] – David Moise

So ultimately, there are many, many companies trying to find IT software developers, scrum men or scrum masters, masters, a variety of technical positions, and we help them with that. It's an interesting place right now. According to some places like an organization called code Dot.org, there are over half a million open IT and software development jobs here in the United States. And just if you wanted to grow the GDP by one percent, fill all those roles. And, you know, wanna skip a recession if we could do that. And that's just how many there are. Colleges are not cranking out enough people. The demand for technical people is incredibly high. It's gonna stay high. So we just work with companies. I mean, there's a lot of, at the end of the day, we're a staffing company, and there's a lot of varieties of staffing companies. And we just focus on the IT and technical spaces.

[00:06:00.39] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I had no idea, you know, based on those numbers and those statistics just how, you know, big it is. I have heard it, you know, a lot that, you know, people are always looking for, you know, tech those technical people, but I think, you know, just even you as speaking on a from a sales aspect of, like, how, I guess, you know, it's harder to plug and play when it comes to probably tech technical, positions, so you have to make sure that you're getting the right people in the right seats.

[00:06:26.00] – David Moise

The right people, the right seats, the right skills, and the skills are changing and they're evolving. The way I describe it to a lot of people, the menu of technical skills is ever-growing. And just to put it one way. So seven, eight years ago, if you had a software developer who had SQL, dot net, c sharp, JavaScript, jQuery, you could find twenty jobs for that person. And now there's fifty jobs, but they need you know, it doesn't have to be jQuery. It has to be Angular Two or React Native or something like that. Across the board, the amount of technical, things you could focus on is just increasing, which makes it harder for companies to find the right person. Then you wanna throw in a good culture fit, and someone who can get along with the team, and then someone who's got the soft skills on top of that, which is across any type of, recruiting and staffing industry. So no. It's an interesting time to be in this business.

[00:07:29.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. No. And that's what I was imagining too, you know, as I see, you know, technologies everywhere in all different industries. It's not just its own industry that with happening, it's starting to be a requirement for everybody to have at least some technical skills. And if you're in a technology position, as you said, you probably have to have a robust kind of knowledge about different types of technical skills as well.

[00:07:51.19] – David Moise

Yes. Absolutely.

[00:07:52.89] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I didn't know if I kinda touched on this when I read your bio, but I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. I didn't know if it was that technologist, aspect and that perspective that you felt kinda set you apart and the organization apart. But is that your secret sauce or is it something

[00:08:07.30] – David Moise

There are a couple of them and yeah. Absolutely. That's one of them. In our industry, it is dominated by people or companies run by someone with a recruiting background or sales background. And nothing wrong with that. We have recruiters. We have to ask people on our staff. We have to have them. But myself, coming from a technical background, gives us an edge. It's something different. I can get my team together and I whiteboard a lot of things. This is what they're talking about when you hear this phrase. Here's how this came to evolve. And where they were kinda scratching their heads and trying to do a Google search, I can break it down for them and help them understand what they're looking for, good questions to ask the clients and the candidates. So that gives us a plus on several things that we do.

[00:08:53.60] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. No. I love that. And I wanted to, switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:09:06.60] – David Moise

I'm gonna go I'm gonna throw a book out there and then one other thing. Okay. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There is a book that kinda affected me a particular way years ago when I read that, it was that. And it just gave me a different perspective on how to solve problems. Another CEO hack and this is more tangible for people Mhmm. Automation. Automation.

In bigger companies, you're gonna hear the phrase digital transformation. How do we get the orders from our supply chain directly into the, c e into the invoicing or whatever the case may be? Mhmm. And and that's great for bigger companies, but for smaller companies, startups, people with, you know, ten or fewer people, you can automate things too. There are some great tools out there that are easy to use, low cost, Zapier, IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, Microsoft Power Automate, or Power Automate.

[00:10:11.79] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. Absolutely. No. I definitely appreciate those two hacks. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be, like, a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. Could be around staffing or or hiring, or it might even be something you would tell your younger business self.

[00:10:26.10] – David Moise

To other CEOs, establish core values. Think about what they are and don't make them these. Our mission is to make the world yeah. No. No. No. What are things that you would hire people for, and fire people for? What are those guidelines if you were to sit back and say, if some of this is an action that we wanna do, that's a core value? If someone does this, I would fire them hire them give them a raise, or promote them. That's a core value. Think about what your core values are. Go through the exercise of defining them, writing them down, and letting people know what they are. Put make posters of them. Put them in your office.

[00:11:08.39] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quotes, unquote CEOs on this show. So, David, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:11:20.39] – David Moise

I mean, there's some, clearly some selfish things in there. I mean I started this, I'm like I'd like to make more money and make do it build it for myself and those are the clear things and you know you know, anyone who's gonna start a company wants that. But there's nothing bigger with this at all. How do you build that tribe, that community for the people that are working for you? How do you get them to feel like they are part of something bigger? How do you get them to feel like, yes, it's more than just them and then we can't come in and clock in and clock out? How do you get them feeling like they are part of something, part of a tribe? How do they grow? And that's a challenge. And some people were with me that really buy in and they're all in, and that's great. And those are the ones that fit to the core values. And I've had some people before and did not really care, like, why are they here? Always looking for those people and what it means to me is, can I get those people who wanna be part of this tribe? And can I provide them with something? Can they provide the tribe with something? And when all that's clicking, it's great.

[00:12:28.29] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, David, truly appreciate that perspective, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

[00:12:43.79] – David Moise

Yeah. And I, gonna throw one thing out here just when I get into how do you, you know, the automation, what do you do? I mean, we're not a big company. We're not on the four yeah. Fortune one thousand, even close to that. But with some simple tools, something that we've done and just as like during this COVID period here, a thing that we'd automated was going out and finding out what are the open IT roles in Houston. And we've done have a couple of things that we're scraping or calling some APIs to get that data and we're holding that. We started this a few months ago and then when everything started going crazy and everyone's getting laid off, we very quickly changed tax in that and started posting on our website, decisconsulting dot com, all of the open IT roles that are in Houston and not just us, our competitors.

All the companies that we're hiring, consulting companies, and we just put it out there and told the community looks we know a lot of people are hurting right now, you're trying, you know, there's a lot of people just need another job, need to know what's going out there and we placed all that out there and we started our, you know, we configured our email campaigns and our LinkedIn campaigns to just point people to that and did it as a public service and really with the hope of helping people. And what happened is while everyone else is seeing their traffic go down on the web, on their websites during COVID, we're seeing our web traffic triple. And we got so many more people coming to us and saying, thank you for doing this.

This is a great thing that you're doing. And the way that we just had some automation going on behind the scenes, very simple stuff, we're not a big company but we were able to pin a few things, we're really getting some big benefits from this and we hope that will continue. So I encourage know, companies to think of creative ways that you can use some of these automation tools. And where you can find us, Deci Consulting dot com, the best place to get out there. We have links to our Twitter and Facebook and, LinkedIn pages from there. But, yeah. Just go to decide consulting dot com.

[00:15:01.70] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Thank you so much again, David. We will have the links and information in the show notes, and everything I think you mentioned that, that that project and and the things you're working on is also available on your website as well Yes. That you can check out. No, I think that's phenomenal, and again, we have that in the show notes that you know, again, how we kind of talked about a couple times during this interview about how important it is to kind of, I don't wanna say think outside the box, but maybe think differently about some of the things that you might already be doing and some of the value that you're able to provide and think, kind of from a service standpoint on how you can help out people. And then sometimes those ancillary things that we do have those benefits that happen to us as well too, as you've, you know, talked about as well. So I appreciate you for reminding us of that and how we all have the ability to do that as well too. And, I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

[00:15:47.50] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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