Edward V. Szofer With SenecaGlobal

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia, it’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:13] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio, and this is going to be a good one today on the show we have Ed Szofer and he is with Seneca Global. Welcome Ed.

Edward Szofer: [00:00:23] Hey, good afternoon, Lee, how are you?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:25] I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Seneca Global. How are you serving, folks? Yeah, I’m

Edward Szofer: [00:00:32] Very happy to do so. You know, send a global, in a nutshell is a software development engineering firm and bottom line. What we do for a living is to help companies innovate, write software and get technology to market faster all in the business world, so to speak. So nothing in academia or sciences, but pure business, consumer business to business stuff. So we we help companies write software at the end of the day or manage it.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] Now is this something that the companies can’t do themselves internally? They have to kind of get help from a firm like yours?

Edward Szofer: [00:01:08] Yeah, that’s a great question. The bottom line is there’s so much demand today for software. If you look at from your handheld device to your refrigerator to the automobile, you may drive all of those things have some kind of computer chip in it and somebody’s got to write that software. And the more they innovate with hardware or whether it’s Internet of Things or what have you, what you’ll see is more people have coming up with innovative ideas, new ways of doing business, more efficiency, more data, and somebody still has to manage and create that technology to be to make it come to life. And frankly, there’s just not enough engineers, software developers, testers in the world, not let alone the United States. So we try to fill that gap.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:55] And what was the catalyst of the idea? How did this come about, where you were like, Hey, you know what? There’s a gap here and that I can build a team that helps fill that.

Edward Szofer: [00:02:05] Yeah, it’s again. You know, if you look at the last 20 years, especially when the dot com bust hit back in 2000, there was a hesitancy for young people in the U.S. and around the world to get into technology. And as a result, the advent of mobile devices and all these technologies I mentioned a moment ago required more and more engineering and technology skills. And what happened was companies couldn’t avail themselves of the best tech talent. You know, either they work in Silicon Valley or in Boston, or what have you and people, you know, musical chairs with respect to people hanging on to good people, businesses hanging on to good people. And you know, we came up with a model that kind of helps clients. Our clients have teams that they can rely on for the long term.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:52] So then the teams are working for Santaco Global, but serving these kind of portfolio of clients.

Edward Szofer: [00:02:59] Yeah, exactly right. So what happens is you’re, you know, Lee Kantor Inc has a software thing and you got money from a venture firm or something and you want to bring it to market. Say it’s the next Facebook. You know, you’re going to have difficulty finding technology skills and architects who can help you bring that thing to life unless you’re going to pay a boatload of money. And there’s always a balance between the economy and getting things to market. So we’ve done is created a pool of engineers, which we do both in the U.S., but most of it offshore in India, where we develop a team. And now, in my example, Lee Kantor Inc can have a team that we build specifically for them. They work for Sinica the 100 percent employees, but they’re dedicated to you and you have the ability to where there’s a bigger labor market. Frankly, there’s still some cost arbitrage of doing it offshore. And now you have a team instead of in Atlanta of 10 15 developers. You have a team in India that are yours. And over the course of time, year over year, which is our general model. You know, we work with companies for many, many years. They just become transparent. And Seneca is a long term partner of these organizations,

Lee Kantor: [00:04:07] And the benefit to the enterprise organization is that your experts really can get deep depth of knowledge in a niche and then really kind of figure out the best practices to serve them, rather than me having to kind of start from square one to build this out and go through the learning curve.

Edward Szofer: [00:04:26] Yeah, part of that’s right, it depends on the nature or the maturity of the business. So if, in my example, Lee Kantor Inc was new and you had the great idea but weren’t necessarily a technologist, you’d rely on us for, you know, expertize and advice as to how you may want to build, maintain and grow that thing, you know, on the cloud, blah blah blah. Other companies partners just need us to augment what they’re already doing, meaning they’re already good technologists that got great architects and developers and people are putting this stuff out there. But as they grow, they need more and more help. Because the market is moving, they want to gain more competitive advantage, et cetera. And as a result, you know, they need just more bandwidth and we provide that for them.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:08] So it really doesn’t matter the need of the organization when it comes to this type of technologist, you have a way to service either either party.

Edward Szofer: [00:05:19] Yeah. You know, at the end of the day, it depends. You know, we can’t be all things to all people, but in mainstream technologies and certain areas of software development. And I should mention quickly that when you’re writing a software to be used to go to market, it’s a lot different than something you may be doing in-house to manage your business. You know, if you’re a traditional manufacturer, the systems you use are going to be a little bit differently constructed versus something that may be used by millions of people in the mobile areas or in the enterprises, et cetera, depending on the nature of the Beast. So having a knowledge of more complex, complex product development is different than pure application development in our world. So you need different types of skill sets in different thinking because, you know, if you’re familiar with your own phone, there’s chances are whether you’re an apple or an Android user, you’ll see an update every two or three weeks or six weeks. What have you? You know, somebody writing that stuff to be brought to the masses. So if you’re a Facebook or if you’re somebody else who’s big and there’s a million of these companies, they are constantly innovating their software, increasing it, improving it, fixing it. And that’s a different cycle versus a company who may be just counting widgets in their manufacturing facility.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:27] Now are you working with companies that are like building their own software from scratch where you help them execute that? Or they might have existing software that is maybe an off the rack software that needs to be customized and you can help them in that area as well.

Edward Szofer: [00:06:44] Actually, mostly, frankly, the the newer stuff, if you will. Things that are being brought to market are generally companies who are well-funded, have innovation, are either owned by private equity or venture people or the individuals themselves, and they want to get something to market. Many companies in the tech world start that way. And as I mentioned, they struggle, you know, maintaining a team to get that to the next level. And now they may have somebody, you know, they may have a chief technology architect, they may have a few people. But to scale, it’s more difficult for them. A company that’s already been around for many years and that’s many of our companies as well, have a little more maturity. We work side by side with their folks to enhance, develop or sometimes even just maintain stuff that’s older because they’re working on the new stuff. There are people here in the U.S., for instance, maybe doing that to keep them motivated and not leaving to the, you know, the Google next door, so to speak.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:35] So now are there any trends in the software development space and software management space that you’re seeing now that’s going to impact people in the next year or so?

Edward Szofer: [00:07:45] Yeah. Oh, there’s no question about it. If anybody is somewhat familiar here, a lot about cloud, you’ll see a lot. Of advertisements on TV, and you know, cloud is obviously a big thing, but people have a tendency to use that moniker and over extend it in a way. I mean, all a cloud is is somebody else’s computer. Meaning instead of you having it on your desktop or in your house or in your in your offices, you’re just giving it to an ad or a Google or Microsoft to put out there. And there is a difference, however, in the benefits of the cloud, which is going to continue and it’s been going on for a while now is the ability to scale it up. So if you have day one, only one hundred customers, if you’re selling software of some sort to help a health care company, you’ll see that once it gets to a ten thousand or a million and you’ve got more data, you can spin that up. It’s a lot more efficient and effective than adding servers into your server room or your computer room. That was the only way to do it back in the old days. The other thing you’ll see as a trend with Internet of Things. You know, that’s another cool phrase of just as I mentioned earlier, you know, a refrigerator or car or some device in your household may have, you know, a computer capability, of course, and that’s something that’s really growing like crazy because of all the use cases of if you think of your Alexa or your smart speaker or something like that, you know, all that stuff is now interfacing with actual machines, hence the term machine learning. And then after that, you’ll talk about artificial intelligence. But again, some of that is more advanced than others. We play in most of those areas, but it’s really nuts and bolts of just getting your current software. You’re developing your product to market or expanding it as it relates to competitive advantage.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:28] Now, when you’re working with folks, are you working in terms of the creativity or the kind of the buildout of the software that they’re working on? Are you working on aspects as like the cyber security elements or the privacy elements? Or, you know, some of the protection issues that you have to do that may not be as creative, but they’re just as valuable.

Edward Szofer: [00:09:52] Oh, you know, well said. You know, we specialize not in everything you know, like we don’t do defense stuff, but you know, security has got to be part of everything. Anything can be hacked. If you’re dealing in the health care industry, you know, our firm has to be hyper compliant so that we’re dealing with information on an individual, perhaps their medical records, et cetera. Another aspect might be if we’re working with financial services firm, we need to be PCI compliant or and then there’s this thing called ISO. If you’re familiar with that, where it’s all about security and and things of that nature, where you have to follow certain standards or your software can be vulnerable, which then becomes as you’ve seen many times, we all seen many times a business issue. When you get hacked and people get credit card information stolen or inventory information stolen, or, you know, it’s crazy. So security’s huge today, without a doubt, and you have to architect for that differently than you did in the old days, because now in many, in many cases, you know your information your software is dealing, it’s in the cloud. Now these big providers like IBM or IBM, of course, as sure Microsoft have many security protocols, but even then you have to architect differently. It’s like building a house not on old fashioned dirt, but now you’re building it on pylons over water. You need to have a different foundation. You need to know how to build that thing properly and then maintain it because they change that environment all the time. Therefore, you need to keep up with that. Otherwise you’re going be behind and release levels and things of that nature.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:17] Now, is that a kind of the catalyst for you getting new business if one of your clients has, or maybe not a client yet, but maybe a firm has been hacked or something bad has happened to them where they’re like, Hey, maybe we have to shore up this side and the folks at Seneca Global can help us.

Edward Szofer: [00:11:35] You know, we could do that, but that’s not normally not how we get our business. You know, normally what happens is companies are just struggling to find qualified people. And since we don’t deal with big companies, you know our our sweet spot as companies between, you know, 50 and a billion or $2 billion in sales on the technology side, those companies may be smaller because they may be earlier in their maturity. So they have difficulty and just getting that product out to market or maintaining it. And they want to excuse me, they want a firm who understands product development and all the things like security and things we mentioned earlier that go along with that. And to work in these areas of methodology regarding you hear of agile methodology, there’s ways to write software today, still for my skills, but luckily I have smart people in our company. You know how to do this thing. And therefore, you know, they’re working in tandem and getting a lot more productivity out of it, you know, and that’s a key thing. You know, time to market seems to be very important as well as, you know, not losing ground because somebody is hiring your individual developer down the street, stealing them from you. The bad news there is salaries are going up. The man creates, you know, more competitive nature out there from a labor market perspective, and that’s something everybody faces.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:47] So early on you, your firm was partnering. Offshore with India. Are you going into other countries or is that your primary source for the technology?

Edward Szofer: [00:12:57] First of all, it’s one company we are India, we here in the United States. The Seneca Global is is one company with Indian operations that are wholly owned by Seneca Global as well as a U.S. arm, of course. And most of our clients, we have a few off in Asia, but most of them are US based. I have teams of senior US based individuals here who work with our clients, and then they work with the teams in India that are dedicated to our clients. But we are not in any other countries right now. We chose only India because frankly, that’s my partners were there. I’ve done business there for a couple of decades and there’s a large labor pool there. And you know, at any company you see here in the U.S. that is technical related or large companies like Accenture and the Microsofts of the world, they all have facilities there for a lot of reasons, but don’t have to get into that now. But government there and they’ve invested in technology for the last four decades, I’d say, before way before Y2K, back in 99.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:52] Now, a phrase that people are talking about are digital transformation, can you talk a little bit about that, what that means, number one, and how your systems can help companies take advantage of that?

Edward Szofer: [00:14:05] Yeah, you know, digital transformation is one of those cool terms that can mean anything, in my opinion. In a nutshell, it takes, you know, we have we we have customers who are not all tech fliers and companies that have innovative ideas. We do have a good substantial 20 plus percent of our businesses with companies that are brick and mortar type companies, whether they’re food companies, et cetera. And they need to transform digitally because what happens is they have something I would term as technical debt. So if you’re a business, you’re running on an old set of software and it could be a big business, by the way, it could be a multi-billion bunch of plants, bunch of distribution centers and you’ve kind of been milking away at the old technology just to run your business. What’s happening is there’s not enough. There’s a lot more to be had with embracing new technology, specifically when it comes to data mobile technologies being able to take what assets you have in your business, whether it’s data or actually just information around, say, you’re building something a bricks or something. You know you want to get that on your salespeople hands.

Edward Szofer: [00:15:07] You want more mobile enablement, you want to have customers see inside your four walls. So there’s a lot that needs to be done there. And companies are transforming digitally to take what their old systems were that were proverbially proverbially sitting in their closet and moving it to the cloud or getting new software to help them get there and take advantage of all the tools. Plus, the old stuff costs more money to run, and you can’t find people necessarily to maintain it. So you know that’s what we call technical debt. If you haven’t invested, it’s like for anybody who’s old enough to remember the Fram oil guy. It’s like, Hey, you can pay me now or pay me later. But if you put this off forever, you’re going to have to really invest in tech to get digitally transformed, to work in today’s environment. Because some competitor down the street may be offering your customer a better way to buy medical supplies versus the way you used to. You had a catalog instead of some cool digital front end.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:59] Now, I’m sure for the listeners, it’s hard for them to really understand how that’s still possible in today’s day and time. What percentage of companies are in that situation where they haven’t invested into digital as much as maybe they should?

Edward Szofer: [00:16:16] Yeah, I’ll tell you what, I couldn’t give you exact numbers, but you know, the banking system is interesting. We don’t do a lot with banks, but I happen to know something about it. You know, a lot of banks have cool front end. You can transfer money, you can do Venmo, you can do sell, you can do all that. But their back office systems, in many cases, big banks. You’d be surprised how much of them are running on old mainframe. So what they do and they have to do this is put front ends on stuff, but the mechanics behind it. So it’s like putting a nice facade on a house that might be crumbling. It looks good from the outside, but inside you’re really maintaining it. The plumbing is starting to get old. You can’t find the right electrical wire, you can’t do this. And you know, in the cost is really the barrier to really take change the whole thing. So, you know, that’s that’s one challenge is that these companies find themselves a little behind the eight ball and maintaining something that costs them more every day. And because it’s a huge commitment to make a radical change

Lee Kantor: [00:17:12] Now, Seneca Global focused on certain niches. You’ve mentioned a few, but is this kind of industry agnostic, really? At the end of the day, a little bit.

Edward Szofer: [00:17:21] But you know, there is something to be said to have domain expertize. So, you know, we have a good presence in health care in manufacturing, distribution companies, financial services companies and companies that just write software. You know, maybe more, like you said, agnostic to something that you don’t have to be an expert on something that’s selling something and a b to sea level in terms of the software. But when you’re dealing with health care or financial services, it’s pretty good to know the terminology. You know, again, the compliance issues one may face understanding the rules and regs hospital works a lot different than a provider at a clinical level versus a insurance provider, right? But it’s sometimes all bundled as health care. The more domain expertize you have, the better. And frankly, if we don’t have them on staff, you know we find them or we work with the teams to educate them, you know, leads with tech first, but it’s much stronger to have somebody who understands your lingo.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:16] Now, do you also work with like private equity firms or VCs to help kind of scale up, you know, a funded company that has a good idea but just doesn’t have, you know, the talent needed to scale it to the extent that it maybe could? And these VCs are private equity firms can really benefit from that speed.

Edward Szofer: [00:18:36] Yeah, you know, we have a few private equity partners and they love our model for two reasons. One, we understand what it takes to innovate and move fast along the continuum of getting a product. So if you’re a private equity company, chances are you put a fair amount of money into. X y z en company x y z. Private equity guys and gals want to do what they want to make as much revenue as possible, make as much profit as possible, spend their money wisely. Development’s important product technology is important. All that’s important. But if you can, if you can do it more efficiently, you can take that money that you can’t spend in India. Through our firm, you can use more marketing and sales efforts, more branding. That stuff should be done here in the U.S. if you’re a U.S. based company and work with technology companies such as ourselves to leverage our model such that you can save some money there, use the money here to go to market faster. As I mentioned in the things that will give you that advantage and be more effective with your with your investment.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:37] So what do you need more of? How could we help? Are you looking for more talent or are you looking for more clients, more partnerships with like private equity firms? What do you need more of to grow in the coming years?

Edward Szofer: [00:19:48] You know, the simple answer is all the above, you know, you know, our our growth has been pretty strong, very strong. In fact, a lot of that is because of the demand we mentioned on the beginning of this interview. Frankly, people are hurt. You know, there there’s more demand and need than there is supply. My company has spent a lot of time and money on creating what we call it. It’s not, we call it, it’s actually a worldwide recognition of great place to work. If people ask me, you know, often, you know, how are you differential? Well, you know all the stuff I said earlier, great. It’s all cool. But you know, it’s all about the people and made sure they stick around and they want to work here versus, you know, the big player down the street. So we’ve invested heavily in career development, people, you know, culture and all that stuff. So we have some of the lowest attrition levels in the industry. We’re great place to work on a number of different levels, and that means a lot because everybody who’s a technologist today, whether you’re in the U.S. or India, probably and I don’t think I’m exaggerating, has three to five job offers. I mean, that’s how crazy this market is right now. Salary is one thing, but you know, when you’re, you know, when you’re competing, you know, they want to look at the whole thing and we’ve really pushed careers. So when you ask the question, what could I use, I could use more people. So if there’s people, you’re looking for a job, I’d love to have them love to talk to them who are good technicians and developers, et cetera, and certainly love to talk to all the companies who are needing technical help. You know, we’re pretty good at this for a long time, and I think we’re a model that really bodes well to that given, you know, the history we’ve got and the testimonials and customer history we’ve got.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:16] Well, before we wrap, can you give a piece of advice for other executives out there when it comes to culture, you’ve talked about it, you say that’s kind of your secret sauce. Can you talk about how obviously, as a leader of this company that was important to you and culture is one of those things. If you’re not mindful and intentional, it’s going to form either way. So you might as well pay some attention to it. Can you talk about something actionable a CEO can do to kind of create that culture they’re proud of that can attract people to them rather than scare them away?

Edward Szofer: [00:21:50] Yeah, no, that’s a great point. There’s two things. I mean, you know, we have a majority of our employees are in India, so I won’t belabor that because I’m sure the audience here is U.S. but when we talk to a potential client, they like to hear that we look after them. You know, we do a lot of things culturally and career wise. Yeah, small example. You know, technical skills are important anywhere. You know, once you get through that hoop, what’s the difference between working for Seneca Global or working for Google or Microsoft? The difference is, Hey, you know what? We really care, you know, in the sense that we concentrate on, you know what it means to you because everybody in my business, it’s not like they’re a shoe, a shoe machine that makes shoes every day. They can go and work any place they want. They can leave me any time they want, right? And so I’ve got to make sure that we outweigh our competition salary benefits. Culture education’s really big for us, especially in India, where we want these people to work on their soft skills almost as much as their technical skills, meaning that when they communicate their business writing skills so they can advance career wise to invest in themselves. And we’ll help them do that because if you only want to be a programmer for the rest of your life, great make a good living. But you know, if you want to get into other aspects of career development in technology companies, it’s management of programs, projects, sales, you name it. And you know, soft skills are important communication all that you know, in education. So, you know, you’ve got to compete really hard for the individuals, certainly here in the U.S. but I would say it’s even more relevant in India and some of the other upcoming technology based countries like the Eastern Europe, et cetera. So crazy

Lee Kantor: [00:23:23] Good stuff. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to learn more about Seneca Global, whether it’s, you know, for a job or for an, you know, a partnership with your company to help them grow, what is the website?

Edward Szofer: [00:23:38] It’s Seneca Global. One word. It’s just like it sounds SCCA Global and you’ll you’ll find us there. We’d love to hear from you.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:47] Well, ed, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work when we. Appreciate you,

Edward Szofer: [00:23:52] Lee, thank you very much for your time. It’s a pleasure to get to meet you and be on this broadcast.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:56] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on high velocity radio.