IAM2579 – Founder and CEO Transforms Complex Business Challenges into Scalable Solutions

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Charles Howard Teaser 00:00

We just thought we could do better. We thought we could probably do the job that we were doing every day really well, but we could own a piece of it.

And we could also create a company that would offer other companies a really good solution for building their business processes and for automating things and for creating effective systems that actually move them forward.

Intro 00:22

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:49

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Charles Howard. Charles, excited to have you on the show.

Charles Howard 00:58

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Gresham Harkless 01:00

Yes, I'm super excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Charles so you can hear about some of those awesome things.

And Charles is the founder and CEO of OpenWacca, a Salesforce consultancy that transforms complex business challenges into elegant and scalable solutions.

With over 20 years of experience building Salesforce systems, Charles brings deep expertise in structured design and user-centered development to every engagement.

He's passionate about building high-performance teams and untangling broken implementations with clarity and precision.

He's a frequent voice on leadership, team dynamics, and the intersection of technology and human performance.

And Charles offers a system-level perspective grounded in a real-world experience, and his work empowers organizations to operate smarter, scale faster, and lead with intention.

And Charles has a wealth of knowledge and experience, so I'm super excited to kind of delve into this.

Has a background in artificial intelligence research, game development, web technology, process design, and technical project management.

And I was reading something, and he has something proprietary called the Design Ninja Methodology, which I'm going to love to hear a little bit more about.

But so many times I think we look into either human, either technology, these two things can't play well in a sandbox, but I love that he has that philosophy where it's not either or, it's both and better.

Super excited to delve in. Charles, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Charles Howard 02:24

Yep, let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 02:25

Let's get it started then. So, to kind of kick everything off, let's rewind the clock, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Charles Howard 02:31

Well, I think it started when my friend and I figured out how to hack the Oregon Trail video game in seventh grade and just started messing with code.

And what I always wanted to do ever since then was write code, be a software developer, be a programmer.

So, fast forward many, many, many years, and I ended up working at a large medical company where I was introduced to Salesforce.

I've done a lot of different things in all kinds of different paradigms, programming languages, and things like that over the years.

Salesforce sort of realized what they had created was a cloud-based or an online platform for running business logic, and they decided to call it their cloud.

I thought, OK, that's going to be huge. So, from there on, I focused primarily on Salesforce development within that large medical company.

And you mentioned the design ninja process. That came from being a solo admin and developer for a Salesforce instance that was being used by 14 different departments, and trying to handle all the requests.

And all the things that came through, trying to figure out what I was supposed to build, whether things conflicted with each other or not, what people were actually asking for, working around how people focus on the one big, like, shiny thing, but they forget about all the other 80% of what it takes to really build a system.

So, I developed that process while I was working at the medical company, and then also applied it to getting pulled into acquisitions and things that they were making where they had other Salesforce instances that needed to be merged together.

And so, you got to get them speaking sort of common language with each other and establish a common data structure.

And let's see, we're going to the start of the business. So yeah, my business partner and I, who's actually my brother, was also working with the same medical company.

And we were involved in a lot of different projects, good projects, bad projects, things that went sideways, all kinds of stuff.

And we just thought we could do better. We thought we could probably do the job that we were doing every day really well, but we could own a piece of it.

And we could also create a company that would offer other companies a really good solution for building their business processes and for automating things and for creating effective systems that actually move them forward.

So, in 2013, I quit my corporate job and started OpenWacca full-time. And it's been quite a ride since then.

Gresham Harkless 05:11

Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine. And I love definitely hearing that journey. So, I would love to drill down a little bit more and hear a little bit more on some of the projects that you worked on.

And take us kind of through that process of when someone calls you and says, hey, I need help with X.

What does that look like? And how do you help serve the clients you work with?

Charles Howard 05:31

So, we start with an initial conversation, get an idea of what they're trying to do, what they think they need.

Sometimes people just need, actually need help finding that direction, and we're happy to help with that.

We like to spend some time, you know, several meetings with clients ahead of time, before we put an estimate out there, if we can to do some initial definition, just free of charge, so that we actually know what we're talking about when we put an estimate out there.

And then once people want to engage with us, we get a statement of work written up with an estimate around it.

We'll typically put that in as a do-not-exceed number so that they know that there's a cap to what's going on, but otherwise, we bill hourly, and then we get into the design process.

And that can vary depending on the size of what they're trying to do. Some people come to us and actually already have a pretty good design established.

So, we'll walk through it and just double-check everything, make sure that it's cohesive. And then we start working on it.

We always build time into projects for training and support afterwards. So, the estimate always includes that as well.

And then for ongoing support, we also will either allow prepay hours or set rates for a given period of time and be available for just ad hoc support if people need it.

Gresham Harkless 07:10

All right, that makes so much sense. And a lot of it sounds like, and this might even be that secret sauce, the thing you feel like sets you apart and makes you unique is from that pain point that you had as a developer where you said, hey, I did all this time towards something and it wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be.

So now I'm taking more time in the beginning. Do you feel like that is that secret sauce, being able to kind of incorporate that methodology that you have so that you can make that come to fruition?

Charles Howard 07:37

Yeah, I think so. And actually, being a CEO myself, I also see that design piece of it and coming up with an estimate that might be more than what you were thinking or even what you could afford as a really powerful thing, because you can look at it and say, OK, we can't afford that right now.

Maybe it's not worth building that system right now, maybe six months down the road, right?

And so, if we work through this process with a company, and they go, okay, we can't do this right now, or it's not appropriate right now, given what it's actually going to take to do, we have a lot of respect for that.

And I think that's good decision-making in a lot of cases, too. But we really like to try to give people that visibility and that understanding so that they can make good decisions about how to run their business and what they need to build and everything. Yeah.

Gresham Harkless 08:30

Absolutely. And it starts to build, like you said, a lot of the trust, um, when you want some, when you want to come back and say, okay, let's go, go and do the next project, and things after that.

It's largely because you've built and maintained that stretch. Well, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack.

So, this could be like an Apple book or even a habit that you have. What's something you lean on that makes you more effective and efficient?

Charles Howard 08:55

In terms of actual things like that, I'd say books written by other CEOs. So, the one written by Mark Benioff about starting Salesforce was really informative early on for me.

Some of the approaches that they took to marketing and things like that, but then also separating all the salespeople from the developers in two separate apartments.

So, they had the talkers in one space and the non-talkers in the other space. Yeah, I appreciated that because I was coming out of the big medical company who had cubicles.

But then they lowered all the walls, and of course, there my boss is sitting right across from me, and she had seven hours of calls every day, and I was in there right trying to write code.

But I would say in general books written by other CEOs, because there are a lot of different paths, but I think that the common metaphors that you can find within those stories can be a really good guide.

And then at a more tactical level, I mean, I've been using ClickUp recently, and it's pretty powerful for just managing the list, the hundred things that are always out there, that are always there to do.

But I'd say having some kind of system where you can get everything in the list, you're not going to forget it, you can define it in a way what it means.

And then let go of it on Saturday and come back on Monday and sit down with some coffee and read through the list instead of having to just try to keep everything in your head and your consciousness all the time because you need some, you need a break.

For years, I worked like six days a week, 50 hours, stuff like that, but it just burns you out really fast.

Gresham Harkless 10:52

Absolutely. So, you might've already touched on this, but what would you consider to be a little bit more of what I like to call a CEO nugget?

So, it could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you happened to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Charles Howard 11:10

I would say value the people that you can rely on. The people that will be there for you consistently.

They're really the backbone of being able to accomplish anything. And then I would say delegate.

Especially coming from where I did, doing software development, being an individual contributor, and being the one actually producing the product, delegation is huge.

Learning to delegate has been huge. It's also really cool when you delegate something to someone and they come back and they did a much better job than you ever could have, it's just like, okay, that's a really good feeling.

Gresham Harkless 11:55

Yeah, absolutely. It's such a phenomenal place to be. And I think it's so hard because it's like that battle with the ego.

And sometimes, when you, especially when you start something, you're a founder, you have the ego to believe that you can build and create a better mousetrap, so to speak.

And when you're able to do that, it becomes phenomenal. But we also have to understand that as we start to evolve, like within our organizations, our role and our responsibilities start to change as well, too.

So, we can't do all the things sometimes we did in the beginning. And so now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.

And our goal is to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Charles, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Charles Howard 12:33

It means being a decision maker, not necessarily the source of the solution, but weighing the options, encouraging people to provide potential solutions, but then in the end just saying, here's the direction we're going to go.

It means you're talking about ego, but having the humility to go that direction and realize that it's not working and you need to adjust, or even planning ahead of time to adjust as you move through things.

And it means taking care of all those people that rely on you and that you rely on, and creating a place where they want to be.

There's a lot of places you can work in the world, and the truth is, a whole lot of people should probably leave where they're working because it's just not good.

So, it's always been our goal to make OpenWacca a place that people want to be, where they want to spend all of that time that you put into work every day.

Gresham Harkless 13:31

Yeah, absolutely. I love that definition. And especially because I was kind of envisioning like being on that light pole where you start to understand, or the watchtower even, and being able to kind of see the forest for the trees, you see all those aspects.

And I think so many times we get so siloed and locked into the thing that we're doing.

But I think as we start to delegate and lean into the systems and all the things, it allows you that opportunity to not just see what you're doing, but see the impact that it's having, whether we're talking about the actual product or service that you're providing.

But also, the human part that I know is so important to you as well, too, and being able to kind of create such a great place and a great environment for people to be able to excel.

And once you start to understand that, it becomes a lot more of a responsibility to make sure that that happens as much as possible, I'm sure, day in and day out.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Charles, truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more.

So, what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know.

And of course, how best people can get a whole view and find out about all the awesome things you and the team are working on.

Charles Howard 14:37

Yeah, I think the just one thing I wanted to make sure to mention is that we have a referral program.

So, we realized a couple of years ago that all of our new customers were coming from referrals.

And we get a lot of business from people that we work with that move on to another company, and then call us up a little bit later and bring us into the new company because they liked working with us.

But if you know anybody who is considering moving to Salesforce or has Salesforce or has HubSpot implementation or development needs, or anything in the Salesforce and HubSpot realms.

We'll pay 5% as a referral fee to start, and then the second referral it grows to 6% and the third one 7% and that grows all the way up to 15% so if you fed us 10 referrals, then you'll be one of our favorite people in the world.

But you'll also be getting 15% of our gross billing for whatever turns into a project for us.

Gresham Harkless 15:32

Absolutely. And the best way to find out about that is on the site?

Charles Howard 15:36

Yeah, we have a page about that on our website. And there's a form that you can fill out on the site.

There's a number that you can call. And I'm out on LinkedIn a lot. So just look up Charles Howard on LinkedIn and send me a message.

And then my email is charles.howard@openwacca.com as well. So, you can reach out that way, too.

Gresham Harkless 16:00

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, I truly appreciate that, Charles. Of course, to make that even easier, we're gonna have the links and information in the show notes as well, too.

So that everybody can follow up with you, connect with you, and it'll help you out for the rest of the day.

Charles Howard 16:10

All right, thanks, Gresh. It was great talking to you, with you.

Outro 16:14

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast, powered by CB Nation and 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.

Want to level up your business even more? Read blogs, listen to podcasts, and watch videos at CBNation.co. Also, check out our I AM CEO Facebook group. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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