This week on the podcast Matt sits down with Josh Smith, CEO and Jonathan Sasse, Chief Strategy Officer of Metova Strategies. During the episode they discuss their roles at Metova and how the company has pivoted through the years since the initial founding in Franklin, Tennessee. They then dive into how empathy and effective listening to customers gives Metova a competitive advantage. They focus on understanding what customers actually need, not just building technologically capable products. They finish with a discussion around the importance of mobile-first design, the Internet of Things and other technology shifts like generative AI.
Episode Transcript
Jonathan Sasse 0:01
And it's remarkable how many companies are so internally focused on how do we do the
right thing for the business? How do we build the things we want to build, without
ever really spending enough time with our customers to know what do your customers
want from you in the first place? And what's most important to them?
Matt Waller 0:16
Excellence, professionalism, innovation, and collegiality. These are the values of
the Sam M. Walton College of Business explores in education, business and the lives
of people we meet every day, I'm Matt Waller, Dean of the Walton College and welcome
to the be epic podcast. I have with me today, Josh Smith, who is CEO of Metova. And
Jonathan Sasse, who's the Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you both for joining me today.
Jonathan Sasse 0:43
Thank you. Good to be here.
Matt Waller 0:46
So Josh, would you mind telling us a little bit about Metova?
Josh Smith 0:52
Sure, yeah. So. So Metova was founded in 2006. Really, around developing mobile applications.
And at that time, really, BlackBerry, and Palm were mobile. And so for the past 17
years, we've continued to lean into mobile and have expanded beyond just not just
Franklin, Tennessee, where we started, but we're, you know, throughout the US and
in Latin America, doing all sorts of things mobile, but then also digital transformation,
digital technology partner to large corporations.
Matt Waller 1:27
And, Jonathan, I know, you have you're the chief strategy officer. What does that
mean? What do you what do you focus on as Chief Strategy Officer?
Jonathan Sasse 1:40
Well, a lot of the companies that we work with are at some point of a pivot in their
strategy, their roadmap, they're facing some kind of transformation. Typically, it's
not in their DNA to do that, especially if it's leaning into technology that they
don't understand. So a lot of what I do is working with those companies, the senior
stakeholders, to better define what their customers need from them, what their capabilities
are, and what their roadmap should probably look like in order to deliver on that.
Matt Waller 2:06
I see. Josh, you know, you're in Bentonville.
Josh Smith 2:10
That's right.
Matt Waller 2:11
But the company didn't it start in Little Rock?
Josh Smith 2:14
Company started in Franklin, Tennessee.
Matt Waller 2:15
Oh, Franklin, Tennessee ok.
Josh Smith 2:16
Yeah, that's where the original founder was from. And then a gentleman from Arkansas
acquired it back in like 2010 or 11. That's when we became begin to have an Arkansas
presence. It's a long road after that, there's been several different transactions
that have happened, private equity investors. But this latest iteration, no longer
do we have any institutional investors and, and we relocated headquarters to Bentonville.
Matt Waller 2:44
Well that's great, and you've been with Metova for almost 10 years at this point.
Josh Smith 2:48
Yes. Crazy to think. Yes.
Matt Waller 2:50
So tell me a little bit. Now I know you've you've had different roles there. But you've
been CEO for almost six years. Would you tell me a little bit more about your company
positioning? I know you where you started? Are there any verticals, you focus on more
than others?
Josh Smith 3:08
Yeah, I'll be pitching us to Jonathan here. But it's really fascinating because we've
been doing this for so long. And actually, Jonathan and I were originally introduced
by the founder of Metova. We were both had our own startup companies. Josh had Slacker
Radio, I had First Orion Privacy Star, we were trying to solve the same problems.
But being serial entrepreneurs and and being able to work with all these companies
for all these years. It makes us kind of industry agnostic. We can go in and learn,
you know, how a company makes money, how they lose money, where maybe adjacent revenue
opportunities are, who the stakeholders are, who their customers are, and then from
there, build out you know their product roadmaps and strategies going forward and
then have the development talent to go ahead and deliver on that.
Matt Waller 3:55
Well, you know, and and I've noticed for you, Jonathan, also have been involved with
another Arkansas company, First Orion. And I had actually I've done a podcast recording
with Charles Morgan. Seems like it was a year or two ago, I can't remember exactly,
but he's an amazing individual. Are you still engaged with First Orion at all?
Jonathan Sasse 4:21
Yeah, I do still communicate with them. I'm, I'm a big fan of Charles, I've worked
with him pretty closely as we've that company went through a number of transformations
as well. So I kind of came in to do very similar things I'm doing at Metova now, which
is take a look at the opportunities to the future and try and rewrite the roadmap
a little bit. And with Charles's help and with, you know, Jeff Stalnacker and some
of the others that were there. We turned that company in a pretty sharp direction,
in a short amount of time and really created an opportunity for the future. That was,
that was a good stretch.
Matt Waller 4:51
And I noticed that you are on the Forbes communications council. So you contribute
articles to Forbes, what kinds of articles do you, do you write?
Jonathan Sasse 5:05
A lot of what we focus on is, is helping people through those transformation challenges.
So, you know, when do you do it? How do you do it? What kind of signals do you look
for? You know, really trying to get people very specific things to key in on to help
them understand, when's the right time to invest? Do you need to seek help? You know,
are there internal resources you can tap into for that? So really trying to write,
you know, a lot of super helpful content for people that have big decisions to make
and are looking for, you know, how do I take the first step in the right direction?
Matt Waller 5:36
Josh, maybe, let's suppose, you know, technology, a lot of times people think of technology
as just being something behind the scenes. But technology, the technology that you
have, in your company can actually affect the brand that you wind up building. Is
it hard to get companies to see that and to understand that?
Josh Smith 6:03
It's a very long process. So I'm not sure who said this, but the best technology is
a technology you don't even know you're interacting with it, right? You get, and then
the coding part of it, not a lot of people are able to see that. It's not something
they can participate in. So when we're working with clients, usually the the strategy
piece of it and design, a lot of input goes into that, because the customers can,
you know, they can see it, and can help drive that and are our goal is to really kind
of stay focused on what is it's gonna drive their business forward, and how to do
that in the most simple way, from a human interface perspective, and then do the hard
part with it with the engineering to make that make that possible.
Matt Waller 6:52
And I know that, you know, workflows and internal communication patterns and trying
to enhance customer experience. You know, a lot of that you can do with technology
you have, but that you develop with your companies. But what about companies that
say, look, we we need your help here. But there's also existing technologies in these
other spaces? Can you? Will you help with that as well?
Josh Smith 7:27
We, generally, that is always part of the equation, right? It's usually companies
have been up in business for a long time, sometimes 20, 30, 60 years, and are looking
to make a transition to digital. They've got a huge investment in that technology
stack that they've developed over the years, and you can't just rip and replace it.
So it is a very gradual process of identifying what parts of the business can we impact
now? And what internal systems do we need to leverage to be able to do that? And how
do we expose those capabilities to actually make that experience happen? And I remember
one client in particular that we had several years ago, first question we asked is,
how does a user create an account, and it was all blank stares in the room as well,
they call into customer service, and the customer service person takes the information
down, like okay, so now we know where we need to start.
Matt Waller 8:18
Well, you know, Jonathan, when you it seems like for me, at least, so many of the
apps I use on my phone, unfortunately, seem like they were created for my computer.
But this concept, would you mind speaking a little bit to this concept of mobile first?
Jonathan Sasse 8:41
Yeah, I mean, the thing with mobile that, that is interesting, when you think of it,
there's everything you do on your phone, your banks, your pizza delivery, whatever
it might be. It used to be that, as businesses, we would look at other businesses
like ours, to see what was competitive. You know, if I'm a lawn care company, I look
at what the other lawn care companies do. If I sell TVs, I see what the other TV guys
are doing. But today, and as to your point, I when I go through all the apps on my
phone to me, I'm I'm engaging as a customer in the same universe. And so I have certain
expectations I have as I go from app to app to app, I don't care what the other gym
apps do. But I know my other apps work really nice. And they're really easy to use.
And I can tap exactly where I want to tap and they're really intuitive. And that's
the level of the way that customers are looking at things. Amazon does things a certain
way. For me, Walmart does certain things for me, Netflix, whatever it might be. And
so I have those expectations that every app I use should be able to leverage that
technology, the elegance of the design those I have those expectations. So it's a
lot easier to be disappointed as a customer too when you open up a new app, you're
like, this isn't as good as it should be. And I have that lens I can apply to that
because I have 10 other apps that can do that. You know whether it's telling me when
the delivery is going to be made, or recommending things I might like or just making
it easy to book an appointment. And so we have to be really aware of that, as we're
designing apps, we're working with companies and brands to make sure that you might
have looked competitively across your landscape to see what everybody else is doing
and try and make something as good. Or maybe even slightly better than that. But you
have to realize that your customers are comparing you to the best experiences in the
world every single day.
Matt Waller 10:17
That is, right. And you can tell a big difference. I mean, there's some apps you use
that you think this is so intuitive, and others, you know, there was one app I was
using not too long ago, and it had pretty good ratings. But it was for keeping track
of your time. It's used primarily for consultants, but I, I like to keep track of
my time, where am I spending my time, compared to where should I spend my time? This
thing was so unintuitive, I think it's hard to take something that already exists
and make it mobile first, if you will.
Jonathan Sasse 10:54
Yeah, the investment in that is always the challenge because you spend all these resources
to get where you are. And and then you release it to the world and find out that it's
not what everybody hoped it would be. And it's very difficult at that point, where
you start taking a look at your customer experience after you've produced your thing.
And that's where, you know, when we talk about these early strategy sessions with
with people that we work with, is trying to get through that first, before you ever
write a line of code is let's make sure we understand what this experience needs to
be. So that we don't build a thing that's functionally capable, but almost impossible
to use.
Josh Smith 11:30
And then what you know and what do your customers use? You've got all all that system
of ERP, all that user input, where are the users spending their time and elevate those
features to the top and maybe push them those other ones down so it's not so complicated
and overwhelming to deal with.
Matt Waller 11:47
One of the things I'd like to talk to you about a couple others, but this concept
of the Internet of Things. This is still a you know, it was really popular for a while,
you don't hear about it as much anymore, but it's maybe more critical now than it
used to be. Would you mind speaking to that a little bit?
Jonathan Sasse 12:08
Yeah. So you know, one of the things that's interesting about Internet of Things,
to your point for, you know, five years ago, it was super buzzy term, you know, what
crypto and NFT's were maybe last year. And I think what we saw is the difference there
is Internet of Things today, we interact every day, everything we touch is something's
broadcasting something somewhere, you know, from your vacuum cleaner to your laundry
machines to your refrigerator, whatever it is. Wi Fi is ubiquitous, we're able to
monitor these things, get alerts and stuff. So it's been an interesting pivot in that
time, where the forecast of the Internet of Things becoming a common everyday occurrence,
this kind of happened. You know, we connected 1000s of devices, whether we know it
or not, you know, throughout the day. And so it's shaping the way we live and work
and play in a way that it's become so ubiquitous now that we may not even realize
it. And so as we've worked with that, we've enabled businesses who 10, 15 years ago,
the tech wasn't there to even try this. And so they weren't even inspired to pivot,
when the web revolution happened, when the mobile revolution happened, they still
didn't need to move, technology still wasn't actually solving their key problems.
And so when you look at something like fleet rentals for like heavy equipment, that's
a business that's been on paper and phone calls, and literally giant machines, you
know, going off into locations where they didn't know where they went or where they
were, or how they're being used. And that was a project we worked on where you retrofit
all these devices with the ability to communicate. And now all of a sudden, I know
where every piece of equipment is, I know what state it's in, or you know, what status
it's in? Is it being used? How many hours is it being used? You know, is it been returned
on time? If I need to go find it? Where is it, you know, so that completely changed
their business in a way that technology, you know, changes over the previous 15 years,
were kind of irrelevant to them. But then it became, we can get rid of all this paper,
we can get rid of all this processing, we can find equipment in seconds instead of
maybe hours or days. And we're servicing the things that actually need to be serviced
the efficiencies through the roof. It completely changed the trajectory of their business.
And that's where we're seeing, you know, on IoT, it's either you have this massive
inflection point for companies that suddenly you know, logistics, shipping freight
is massive changes, but down to the smallest thing where I get an alert on my phone,
that my dryer is completed its cycle. So go get it, like, okay, it's now it's not
sitting there for till tomorrow, because nobody remembered it was in there. And we
just start naturally in engaging with these things. When we're like, oh, my car has
an alert or my, you know, my refrigerator tells me that the door was left open or
whatever it might be. And we don't really think of that as Internet of Things. We
just think of that that's just modern technology in my world now.
Matt Waller 14:46
Good point, you know, I there's there's a place that they go on a regular basis that
when you enter, you've got to pull out your wallet and show it the barcode, but it's
not I've noticed lately, as I'm walking up to this building, it pops up. And so I
just click on it. And I thought, wow, that is so nice.
Josh Smith 15:10
very handy.
Matt Waller 15:11
Yes. Now the fleet is an interesting topic too, because I read an article, it must
have been 10 years ago, I don't remember, it was talking about one that one of the
states in the United States, but they were talking about how many cars were in their
fleet. And it talked about how many they didn't know where they were. And they really
didn't know it at any given point in time where they were, which shocked me, you know,
I thought wow, that's a huge amount of resources that is completely unaccounted for.
Jonathan Sasse 15:47
That's the glaring problem that gets solved by that, right was that I mean, you think
about just fleets in general, whether it's the cars in California, or the trucks in
Wisconsin, or whatever it might be, is, you know, up until very recently, that's how
was for everybody who knows where they are, you know, you might have to call a lot
of people to figure out where something is where today, you just pull up your map
and oh, there it is, like, I know exactly where that is, every time.
Matt Waller 16:11
Well, the pandemic really pushed telehealth forward. And it still is moving forward.
And I think it's going to keep growing in the in the country. Are you all engaged
in that at all?
Josh Smith 16:26
Yeah, absolutely. We've got a variety of health care clients, one of which is innovator
health, that has a very good telehealth platform that's used within the department
defense, able to take compressed video and do you know, medical procedures out on
the battlefield, or at high altitude with someone who's on the ground. So I think
what we're seeing on that side of the house, I look forward to seeing it make its
way over to the commercial side, because it's talk about time and time wasted. As
far as, you know, lab results and go into a doctor's office and all these things can
be done much, much faster. And then on the IoT side of the house, are vitals in our
body, there's no reason that you know, blood pressure cuff once every six months,
probably not giving you the most accurate reading on your health.
Matt Waller 17:17
Well you know know I have an Oura ring, the Oura ring, you know, captures so much
data like it captures your average and resting heart rate, while you're sleeping,
your heart rate variability, which is an important metric, your body temperature,
your respiratory rate, you know, it keeps track of your activity so you know how many
calories you're burning, the frequency of your your workouts, just all kinds of variables.
And it also keeps track while you're sleeping, have your average oxygen saturation,
your breathing regularity. And I thought, well, then you go into the doctor's office,
once every year, whatever. And they take your blood pressure and weigh you and poke
around on you and look in your ears and stuff. And I thought this is way more valuable
than that. I mean, your blood pressure on one reading is tells you nothing. You think
that the medical system would want to be taking this data as well and using it and
maybe they do? I don't know.
Jonathan Sasse 18:25
I think that's coming. The other thing that's interesting, I think that we're gonna
see in the next we're seeing it now, but certainly over the next few years become
more ubiquitous, is a lot of these tools are great at tracking stuff, right? But to
your point, you track your sleep, you track your heart rate, you track all your biorhythms
all these things. But the pivot there is what do you do with all that information?
What does it mean? Right? So being able to use some of these AI models and some of
these other learning tools, you know, these systems can now start to be like, what's
normal for you? And what's not normal for you? And what should you do about that maybe
in real time, right? We talk, we go to the doctor once a year, and they give you like,
hey, you should lose weight, you should do this, and you come back a year later, and
they check your blood pressure again, right. But now you have something that's checking
1000s of things all the time. And you can start to learn, like this is a normal thing.
It might be abnormal for someone else, but it's actually maybe normal for you. And
these might be indicators that something's up, maybe you're not sleeping well, maybe
you're not eating well, maybe you're not getting the same exercise you did before,
whatever it might be. But starting to turn into more prescriptive types of things
instead of like, here's a report of last 60 days, do what you will with this information.
It might be we've been collecting information over the last 60 days, you should do
these things in order to improve these other things. And I think that's where the
medical community will start to lean into that a lot more heavily too as you start
to connect to these devices to your healthcare systems and things like this where
now you do have that I think we're mainly I think the legacy systems that they have
make it harder to adopt this technology quickly. But I think everybody's looking at
this to make sure that you know a doctor can thoroughly monitor a patient through
a whole year, not just in that moment where they're checking your temperature one
day.
Matt Waller 20:06
That's encouraging to hear. So there's lots of companies you can go to, to have software
developed. But to be successful, especially from a strategic perspective, and you
all have obviously had lots of success, there's got to be something there that's giving
you a competitive advantage. So, you know, in terms of, what do you do differently?
How is your culture different? How's your experience different? Or how do those combined
to give you a unique competitive advantage in the marketplace?
Josh Smith 20:42
I'll take the the culture piece of it. So I think our organization over the past probably
10 years, has evolved like everyone else, every other organization, but we lean heavily
into empathy, as one of our core values, which is an extremely hard practice empathy
and, and with each other, with our clients. And with that comes the follow ons of
communication, accountability, and these, these other, you know, tenants that ultimately
leads to empathy. And I think we've, we've got a team that practices that daily, with
each other, and with our clients. And I think that that's the first part of this,
I think that sets us apart.
Matt Waller 21:27
Interesting. Well, there's a book called creative confidence. And it was written by
the founders of the D school at Stanford design school. And a key part of effective
design is empathy. You know, really trying to understand, put yourself in the shoes
of the customer in that case.
Jonathan Sasse 21:55
You know, a lot of companies focus on the wrong things when they're building technology
or using technology, which is just, can I make it work? Not necessarily am I making
work the right way? Or even am I making it work for the right people. And so invariably,
what happens is, you end up with a product that is not really built for anybody, it
was just built to do something. And so when we look at things, we're always working
with our clients to start there. What what do your client why do your clients even
hire you in the first place? What do they expect from you? What are they trying to
do? And how can we make that possible? And so taking that approach is very different
than something like a dev shop. And that term gets thrown around a lot. And there,
there are dev shops out there teams of engineers waiting for you to call them and
do work for them. But if you don't know what you're building, having a team of engineers
is not terribly helpful, actually. And so, for us, we've built our organization with,
you know, leadership, who's been through the wringer of startups and technology, and
building and shaping things for customers and knowing where some of the landmines
are, and what's really tricky. And also, how do you make sure you're listening to
your customers, and you're not just building you the thing that you want, or the thing
you think your business needs, but the thing that your customer wants, and that they
need. And so, when we bring in a team, you know, we spend sometimes weeks, sometimes
months going through those cycles with customers, making sure they understand what
value do you bring to your customer base, and to the people, you want to be your customers.
Josh Smith 23:21
And those can be hard conversations, once we've exposed everything, talk to all the
constituents of the clients, you know, their customers, their, you know, the people
within the company, and, and sometimes think things aren't, as they thought they were.
And their customers actually come to them for something totally different than they
thought they were.
Jonathan Sasse 23:38
Yeah, And there's one question that I ask a lot, especially if we're, if we're at
a crossroads somewhere, which many of the customers we're working with are. And it
is kind of a tough question. But why does? What is your customers even care that you
exist? What what value do you really bring in here? And that can be a very tough question
for people to face, especially when they've just been business as usual for quite
a while. And then you get to that point where like, why do your customers care that
you still have the products you have or the services you have customer? I say, you're
choosing not to make a good experience for me. And so I'm going to apply some judgment
to that.
Matt Waller 24:15
What are you all seeing in terms of integration of current technology with generative
AI tools? Are you seeing my sense is in talking to senior people at companies is many
of them are still not, they wouldn't even know what I just said that that was possible.
What are you seeing with that?
Jonathan Sasse 24:37
Well we're certainly seeing, I think the point you bring up about training your own
data, using some kind of an AI tool is is a really positive direction because you
know, the source of truth of that information. One of the things that's challenging
with a lot of the tools we have today, and a lot of the ones you described is the
results you get. It's hard to tell what level of accuracy it is? Or even? Is it accurate
at all? Or what was the source of the information in the first place. And so you're
casting a pretty wide net, with also a lot of uncertainty of the result you got, which
could be totally wrong, or it could be totally right, you don't know.
Matt Waller 25:14
But I mean, students are getting into this problem, because they trust it too much.
Jonathan Sasse 25:20
That's the interesting thing about it is, we're at this infancy of this, everybody
has their theories of like, you know, we're going into, you know, Terminator days,
or this is going to change our lives for the good, or whatever it may be. But I think
that's, that's gonna be the one thing that shifts a lot, I think, you know, in the
coming year or more is using these tools on datasets that we know to be good. And
so it'll get better at answering the question correctly, when it's using a set of
data that's known, and not just wherever it might cobble some of these things together.
And so, you know, I think as you get, you know, certain industries, I mean, we all
have interactions with chatbots. And these things, and a lot of them are pretty poor,
those things could get considerably better with the right set of learning and training
on that and get real useful feedback with complicated questions. I think that's where
we'll start to see some of the early benefit, but then that internal use of to your
point, training on a set of known data that goes back maybe a long time, and be able
to mine and utilize that data in a way through, you know, the same way we do today
with Chat GPT, or others, but getting responses back that you could rely on in a much
more credible way. And I think we might see some of that where being more transparent
in the results. It almost feels sometimes, like, when you talk to somebody who doesn't
really know what they're talking about, and they just give you a confident answer,
and you're like, well, that's probably true, that seems reasonable. And then you find
out that it wasn't at all
Matt Waller 26:40
Yeah,
Jonathan Sasse 26:41
that's how a lot of these chat tools feel the AI tools feel like is it? It can't,
it gave me a very confident, plausible answer that if it in because I know very little
about the subject I was asking about, it seems believable. But it's really difficult
to check that in any way. And so you might use that for inspiration for more research
and be like, okay, I'm gonna go learn and this is true, but not everybody's gonna
do that. And then that's the risk of kind of where we're at, like, at this moment,
I think.
Matt Waller 27:05
First of all, Josh and Jonathan, congratulations on the great success of Metova. And,
you know, it's it's encouraging to have a company here in Northwest Arkansas that's
doing business all over the place, not just in Arkansas, and doing well. So congratulations,
and thank you for taking time to visit with me.
Jonathan Sasse 27:28
Thank you.
Josh Smith 27:29
Thanks for having us.
Matt Waller 27:31
On behalf of the Sam M. Walton College of Business, I want to thank everyone for spending
time with us for another engaging conversation. You can subscribe by going to your
favorite podcast service and searching. Be epic bee P IC.
