The Relevance of Experts in a Technologically Evolving World

Speaker 1: Welcome to the ‎Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, host of the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Hunter, I always like to point people to other episodes. We’ve had some amazing guests on. You can check out the one with David Allen of Getting Things Done, Michael Gerber of The E-Myth, and many, many more. We have some amazing COOs on who talk about some of the things that make businesses run smoothly, which is always a sexy topic, Hunter.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: But before I introduce Hunter McMahon of iDiscovery Solutions, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. If you have had team members ask you the same questions over and over again, there’s probably a better way. There’s a solution. It’s called SweetProcess. And it’s actually a software that makes it drop-dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff. And I was talking with one of the owners, Owen. He said, "Not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but I discovered that first responder government agencies use them in life or death situations."

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So I’m like, "That’s pretty cool." We actually had him on the podcast as well to talk about what that life or death situations were. You can use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time and your team’s times. You can focus on growing the team and the business. And there’s a free 14-day trial, no credit cards required. Check it out sweetprocess.com. It’s sweet like candy, S-W-E-E-T process.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: And I’m excited about today’s guest, Hunter McMahon. He has over a decade of experience serving as a testifying consulting expert to corporations both large and small. In his current role as chief operating officer of iDiscovery Solutions, Hunter is responsible for providing the cohesion, operational excellence throughout the company, and that’s what’s needed, right? Hunter, thanks for joining me.

Hunter McMahon: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Tell me first about iDiscovery Solutions and what you do.

Hunter McMahon: Yeah, sure. So at its core, we’re a group of consultants and experts that come in and help attorneys and in-house counsel tell a story through data, right? At the end of the day, a lot of the litigation and investigations that we’ve got going on are central to a data, whether it’s the recording of this Zoom meeting, the five emails you sent to me this morning, or the text message that came through, and how that sequence of events has happened, or the structured data in the backend, right? All those payment systems, all the scheduling systems, all the CRMs and all that. We help come in and we help counsel gather and understand that data so that they can tell their story.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: That’s a lot of stuff.

Hunter McMahon: It’s a lot of stuff, and it’s growing. It’s growing exponentially, right?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So they need to collect it all so that they could use it in whatever specific case they’re working on.

Hunter McMahon: Right. So it’s evidence. At the end of the day, it’s evidence. It’s contextual evidence as to what happened. So I can tell you that I got up this morning and ran three miles , or you could look at the GPS on my phone and realize that I slept in today. Which one would you believe more, the fact that the data says I slept in, or the fact that I told you I ran three miles?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. I guess I’m not going to go there yet. Maybe we’ll save it for the end, Hunter, about the… I’m sure you have some crazy stories from seeing different cases. I’m not even sure if you can share any of them on here, but I’m just going to let you… I want to plant the seed, if there is a crazy story you could share at the end of just… And how it relates to what you guys do, but what you found out or what the case was. We’ll talk about it. But I do want to talk about this topic of an expert at becoming an expert and this framework for how one becomes an expert in this world that changes so quickly that if you wanted someone with 10 or 20 years experience, it hasn’t even existed for that amount of time.

Hunter McMahon: Right. So this actually came out of a late night conversation our CEO and I was having about a new case that we got. And part of the problem was the technology was so new that you couldn’t go out there and look for the 10-plus-year expert that has had experience in this testimony and whatnot, but rather look at somebody that knew how to become an expert. And so in this particular case, we were analyzing the data source that was at least allegedly fraudulent from what we understood. And our goal was to go in and understand whether or not it was a valid piece of evidence or whether it had been altered. And in a couple of weeks time, we were able to find 56 data points that had never been testified on about before, but it was a matter of the learning process.

Hunter McMahon: And so at its core, that has to do with our client offering, right? How we come in, we understand a specific data source, we understand the nuances, the intricacies of it, understand how the data interacts with one another. And then our goal is to be able to go understand that well enough, test it. That’s the critical part for one of ours is we’ve got to be able to test it and make it repeatable. And then we go testify about it, right? It’s the scientific methodology.

Hunter McMahon: Now you flipped that framework over to more operationalized. And so now with my focus for the last 18 months or so being more internal and focused on how we are growing as a company is we’ve realized that there are a couple of different lanes of expertise. Well, there’s obviously our client offerings and our subject matter experts that go into court and testify for our clients. But then in-house, we may not have the expertise to do everything. We may not have an in-house expert at connecting two systems or an in-house expert about developing a new process or an in-house expert about optimizing a certain net network configuration for a certain system.

Hunter McMahon: And so what we’ve started to do is layer in this framework where we evaluate it in the standpoint of, first, is this a one-off situation? Is this something that we’re going to be able to button up, make it go away, and then we’re done with it? In that case, you’d probably go hire somebody, right? You go hire somebody that already has that skillset, that does this as their day-to-day job, and you get them in-house and you leverage their expertise.

Hunter McMahon: The middle ground is how so you learn to be an expert? So if this is a recurring problem, if this is a new system that we’ve been bringing in, if we’ve brought in a new technology that we need to make sure that our entire team is trained up on, how do we make sure that not just one team member, but our entire team goes through that methodology of learn it, test it, validate it, test it again, try to break it. That’s always our fun game, who can break the technology, because that, at the end of the day, is a good technologist way of making sure that something works. And then make sure that we can go repeat it. That’s usually one of our critical components.

Hunter McMahon: So it’s, do you bring it in-house? Do you have it? And then really at the end of the day, you’re looking at what do I need to be an expert in based off of my business model? So you kind of look through those first two lenses, and then you say, "Well, is this a one-off problem that I’m going to have multiple of these one-off problems?" And then you start looking at, "Well, am I hiring too narrow of a skillset because I’m looking at one problem rather than the portfolio of problems, or am I trying to focus and spend time on efficiencies somewhere where I shouldn’t be, because that’s not really our core business?"

Hunter McMahon: And so I, for example, recently have been a… Maybe I’m late to the game, but the adoption of things like Calendly and a couple of those other apps that just make life so much easier. In the last couple of weeks, that has saved just hours of frustration and countless emails. But it’s something that I think don’t need to bring in-house. I don’t need to reinvent a new booking app or a calendar management app. There’s something out there that helps me do that.

Hunter McMahon: The other side of it is we wanted to integrate two systems, or we actually had three systems that we wanted to integrate. The communication between two systems was very, very finite and a very one-off problem. Once I built that bridge, it was done. So we hired a contractor to do that, and it could be done. Now I could have pulled internal resources to do that, but that would have taken them away from their priority or where they were the most valuable. So we hired a contractor. They came in. They were able to build that process for us.

Hunter McMahon: Now, between systems B and C, that was going to be an ongoing, evolving initiative. So for that I used in internal resources, built the expertise, and then we’re able to say that that can grow with us. So it’s this balance between knowing where we want to go, knowing what we have right now, and then being able to decide where we need the expertise, not just that I’ve got to go find somebody with 20-plus years of experience, not even assuming that I have to have somebody internally, but rather some strategic partners along the way.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: So it feels like, Hunter, it kind of falls into three buckets, which is you can have people in-house and train them on these things. You can get someone outside to do it. And then maybe there’s pieces managed in-house depending on if it’s ongoing. And then there’s also software or automation that you employ that will save time. Go on the software side for a second. So you mentioned Calendly, a solution you’re like, "Cool. This will save tons of time. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This is exactly what I need." What other softwares do you like that makes your world easier? And then I’d love to talk about the other two also.

Hunter McMahon: Yeah, sure. So some of the software that we’ve realized that we’ve built some software in-house for what we do on a structured data and analytics side from a testimony. So we’ve actually gone in and built that software because we knew that we understood the litigation life cycle better. We could build a better framework. That’s one route. The other route is buying software, right? So Agility Blue is a project management platform, but it ties into other software systems that we had. It’s specifically built for what we do. So instead of trying to go build something new in Salesforce and a new app that’s custom developed by our team, we said that the value for us is actually better just partnering with Agility Blue and adopting that. But we did spend resources under XIoT, because XIoT was something that we needed built our way rather than the general market way.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I love that. Yeah. So there’s stuff that’s already out there. It already exists. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But there was stuff out there, there was a gap in maybe what you need, and that way you may consider building it in-house or hiring someone to build it where you manage it.

Hunter McMahon: Yeah. For us, there’s a significant value proposition under XIoT because it was built by experts rather than your traditional data visualization tool or something like that, that it’s built to make pretty pictures. Ours has got the entire defensibility behind it, the audit trails and everything else that we need for our business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. I love it. Yeah. So there’s a software side, and then that’s an example of where you actually took the software and some of it, you actually built it, and some of it, you just found it off the shelf. That works for you. On the outside, I guess that would be an example. What’s another example of… So it’s not really something you want to hire someone for you. You just want to kind of bring in someone outside. Maybe it’s one-off, maybe it’s not, but you just don’t want to hire that because it’s too kind of narrow.

Hunter McMahon: Yeah. So a lot of that has to do with… I’ll call it a building bridges through systems. So no company operates off of one operating system. You know they’ve got an accounting software. They’ve got timekeeping software. They’ve got other systems, task management systems, all that kind of stuff, software development systems, and project tracking systems. And so sometimes building those API calls and those communication bridges, if you will, between those two systems, a very limited task.

Hunter McMahon: And so there’s been a couple recently where when we start and we establish a project, we wanted to automate certain things that said, "This will happen in our various systems once a project is created." Certain objects are created and all that kind of stuff. Well, coming from one of our specific systems, OpenAir, there was a group that knew how to integrate Salesforce and OpenAir really well together. And so we retain them to build that bridge. That was a one-time, very narrow scope. It was very defined, that would help us create a bunch of automation and triggers from a given event in our engagement life cycle.

Hunter McMahon: Now I’m going to anticipate where you’re going, which is kind of the next bucket, right? What do you keep internally? And the difference was we’ve got other systems that integrate from, say Salesforce to our Office 365 environment. Well, that is becoming more and more of an initiative because we’re creating more and more automation behind team collaboration and collaboration with clients through our O 365 environment. So we actually have a team member in-house who has taken lead on that on all of the development initiatives that says, "When this event happens in Salesforce, now these events start happening in our O 365 environment," but that’s been six months. It continues to grow. It will continue to grow. So we actually have that expertise in-house, as opposed to a very defined scope of an outside resource.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Hunter, what do you consider your criteria for keeping in-house? You said it’s got to be something recurring, that’s always going. What are the other things that you think about when you’re like, "No, this is an in-house. We’re going to be doing this." And maybe you don’t even have that expertise in-house. You’d have to train it, right? Because the obvious is, "We already do this. This is obviously a core competency. We’re going to do this in-house," because you have a lot of different services that you do do. How do you decide on that criteria, let’s say you don’t have that expertise?

Hunter McMahon: Yeah. So there’s a few things that we look at. One is, is it a core aspect of our operations versus is it ancillary, right? Is this just a support mechanism that we want to have happen and it’s there kind of thing? Or is this something that we want to control? Because if we control it, we can, one. Improve it. And one, if we control it, if it goes down or it goes bad, we can fix it. So if it’s something that impacts our clients… So one of the new lenses that I’m taking a hard look at everything through is how does this impact our client experience? [inaudible 00:14:41] a cascading lens that we say, "Is this impacting our client experience?"

Hunter McMahon: So for us, I’ll give you the example of Salesforce creating our group email in O 365. Well, clients know that they can access us through that group email. They can access their team of consultants and team members that are servicing their engagement. Well, if that breaks, I’ve got a client service problem. So if I have that in-house expertise, I can fix that problem faster than, "Hey, we got to put in a new scope of work. We got to do a change order. We got to see what the new budget is," and it becomes a seven-day ordeal just to get somebody engaged to fix it.

Hunter McMahon: Now, on the flip side, if it’s an outsourced scope, I always want to make sure that I have a mechanism to hit the, "Oh shucks," button, right? The, "Hey, it’s broken within a month because something changed." And so I can’t ask for guarantees in perpetuity, right? I can’t ask for a forever guarantee that nothing will ever break, but I need some kind of mechanism for validation that says it’s not just a band-aid, it’s actually a fix for us, and it’s not going to cause problems in a month or two.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I know, Hunter, one of the things you do is cybersecurity, right? And I was reading on your website. Anyone could check out the website, I-D-S-I-N-C dot com. And when you look at it, the thing that stuck out for me was a case study page that says, "Quick recovery from ransomware attack." And so my mind goes off in a bunch of different directions. I wonder what happened there. You do cybersecurity. How does it relate to all this?

Hunter McMahon: Yeah, certainly. So one of the things that we provide is virtual CISOs or virtual chief information security officers. So most small companies don’t have a full-time CISO, but your data is very sensitive. And what happens if you get hacked or you get locked down by ransomware and you can’t get onto your computer?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I don’t have Bitcoin to get [crosstalk 00:16:33].

Hunter McMahon: You don’t have Bitcoin. You can’t even get to your Bitcoin because all your devices are locked. You’re out of your accounts. You can’t get to them. And so do you know how to navigate that? So that really starts to fall for most of our clients in that first bucket of, "I don’t have the internal expertise. I don’t need to have that internal expertise all the time. I need somebody telling me, am I committing big fouls? Where can I get better? And if something happens, I know somebody I can call." And so we serve in that capacity for several clients wherein they don’t have that expertise and they’ve chosen that that’s not their core competency, right? Law firms are a great example of that. Brilliant litigators belong in a courtroom and motions and doing discovery and all of those other legal things, as opposed to worrying about their IT system. So we help them worry about those systems because that’s our expertise.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah, because people are using you in the same respect as how you’re using other companies, right? They don’t want to build some kind of internal information officer. They’d like, "Listen, hopefully, we’re not going to deal with the ransomware attack again. And we need someone to do it, or even putting a system in place so it doesn’t happen again."

Hunter McMahon: Absolutely. So information security in general is a process of being better, not perfect. And so you’re always looking ways to improve. We’re always looking for ways to improve. I think in general, though, when we look at this expert of becoming experts, it’s deciding which lanes you need to be experts in versus which ones you don’t, and you need to have a strategic partner, somebody you can trust that says, "Look. I trust you with my systems. I trust you with my analysis. I trust you with my testimony. That’s not my area of expertise. That’s why we call somebody else."

Hunter McMahon: And we do the same thing. Forever, we’re an EOS shop, out of the book traction. And so we had an implementer [crosstalk 00:18:19]-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I’ve interviewed Gino Wickman before. Yeah.

Hunter McMahon: Yes. And so we had an implementer helping us, Randy, that was helping us build those models and build those processes and optimizing our L10s and our quarterly meetings and all that kind of stuff. That wasn’t our expertise. We grew into it, we’ve grown into EOS, but that was somewhere we needed outside advice.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. I love it. Hunter, two last things. I love hearing your perspective on this. It kind of goes also into hiring. So let’s say one of the buckets is training internally and it goes into having great people that you can train who want to be world-class experts, like what you guys do, and have that expertise in-house. What are some of the things that you look for when you’re hiring someone to have that individual? As we have a technology comes up, maybe it’s a year-old, two-year-old. You want them to learn this stuff if you need to bring it in-house. What do you look for? How’s the hiring process work? What do you look for in that new candidate?

Hunter McMahon: Yeah. So we’ve been looking back at that and saying, "Look, technology is changing and evolving so fast that one of the things we look for from a testifier, if you will, somebody that’s going to come in and be an expert, is do they have a proven track record of learning new technology?" So are they constantly looking for new certifications and new training courses and constantly pushing those bounds of what they’re working on rather than just a traditional data set? Now, there’s nothing wrong with that traditional data set. But if I’m looking for somebody that’s looking to grow and be a continuously learning expert, that’s somebody that you can see through their testimony experience, through their consulting experience and all that has evolved over the course of time.

Hunter McMahon: One of the things we talk about when we look at sales folks is do they have a proven track record of building in our space, as opposed to somebody that claims that they’re going to bring all this business with them day one? We understand that the engagements don’t follow that way. So we want to look for the proven history of, "Hey, I’ve been able to build it up this way in the past, and I can do it again." So we’re not looking for some kind of running start right out of the gate that is the magical unicorn that nobody has been able to hire since I’ve known, but rather somebody that has a proven track record in being able to develop it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah, no, I love that. So the past history and proven track record, because for all you know, that person goes great, and then after a month, they’ve exhausted everything that they had from their previous relationships. Can they do it all over again from scratch?

Hunter McMahon: Right. That’s exactly it. We’re looking for somebody that has that intuition and that learning cycle, right? Because at the end of the day, you’ve got to be learning all the time, constantly reading, constantly learning about clients, the new ways, the new technologies out there on all facets of the business.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: What are some of your favorite… whether it’s via audio or books that you… people or books that you’ve learned from?

Hunter McMahon: Ooh. So, a book-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I mean, you mentioned Traction, obviously, with Gino Wickman.

Hunter McMahon: Yeah. So we issue both Traction and Checklist Manifesto to all new team members. We’re a big believer in checklists, but you got to design the checklist right, so that they’re not a mindless tool. They’re actually an engagement tool. Another couple of… If you’ve read Team of Teams or Extreme Ownership are great books about how to work within a team and the dynamic and information sharing and making sure that you have shared consciousness and everybody understands the goal. Big on decentralized command. Everybody has to understand the objectives rather than just the tasks, because otherwise you lose sight of how you should be executing. And then from a podcast standpoint I listen to a bunch of them. I got to Spartan Up podcast by Joe De Sena. It’s crazy, and my wife calls me crazy for running out there in the different obstacle courses, but it’s good fun and good reasons to get outside and train.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Have you done the races?

Hunter McMahon: I have. I’ve done a bunch of his races across the country.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: I saw him talk in person. He’s a really dynamic speaker.

Hunter McMahon: Oh, he’s awesome. And I like his podcast. They always have some kind of element, some kind of history, but they also have a health perspective to it. So we’ve got a good group of guys in the neighborhood that we’re training for Asheville Spartan right now that’s at the beginning of August. And then of course the COO Alliance podcast that I’ve been on, but also I’m a member of, and it’s just good perspective.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: [crosstalk 00:22:52]. Yeah. He’s got like… Who knows? [inaudible 00:22:55] five different books. I think I’ve listened to all of them.

Hunter McMahon: Meetings Suck.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Meetings Suck. He has one on PR. I’ve listened to all of them. There was another very popular one besides Meetings Suck that everyone loves, and now it’s obviously skipping my brain right now.

Hunter McMahon: Of course. That’s the way it goes. One of the things that I’ve done is try to build a bigger network of different areas of discipline, right? So the network within our space is great, but then also outside of our space, because there’s perspectives from different leaders and business folks, that they’ve gone through something that we’re going through now, but maybe they are a product or maybe they’re an online company. But hey, the struggles are the same, and they figured something out. We don’t all need to reinvent the wheel every time.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yeah. Vivid Vision and Double Double. Those are the two I was thinking of.

Hunter McMahon: Vivid Vision. Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Yes. So last question, Hunter. Before I ask it, I just want to point people towards checking out more episodes of the podcast Process Breakdown, also idsinc.com, I-D-S-I-N-C.com. Check out more of iDiscovery Solutions and what they do there. Hunter, so I don’t know if you’ve thought about at this point, any crazy stories that you are allowed to tell. And you don’t have to say company names or people. We could leave the innocent out of the story. But what comes to mind with some of the stuff that you’ve done at iDiscovery Solutions or in general?

Hunter McMahon: Yeah. So one of the fun things that we do… I say fun because it’s fun for us because it’s data and we love data, right? We’re data geeks… Is we rebuild folks’ lives. So we would rebuild your life and what you’ve done for the last three years because-

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Kind of scary.

Hunter McMahon: … suddenly you think you’re entitled to overtime or something to that effect. And so there was a misclassification. You didn’t get paid overtime or something. And we’re coming in, we’re saying, "Well, how much did you actually work?" And it turns out that where you said it took 17-plus minutes to log into your computer that morning to get your schedule so that you could then leave home and go to the first site of a visit or something to that effect for a service technician, well, based off of the artifacts from the computer and all the data that we have from all of the systems that you logged into, it really on average took four minutes. And you only logged in from scratch once a week because you left your computer on all week. So therefore, it was really 30 seconds, four days of the week.

Hunter McMahon: So, okay. Set aside that argument. Next thing you know, we’re tracking your GPS and all of your audit logs. So where you claimed you worked a 10-hour day based off of the invoices that we sent the client, when we started auditing the actual data from the systems and the records and the GPS included, it turns out you worked closer to a s-x hour day, and we found your favorite fishing hole. And oh, by the way, we found your second job, because what we found out was you were managing an apartment complex across town that you spend a couple of hours every day in the middle of your shift, which, hey, as a salary employee, was not a problem because you were getting the job done. Everybody was okay. But then you decided to Sue us.

Hunter McMahon: That was fun because I mean, we found second jobs. We found affairs. We found everything you could think of under the sun. Well, they stopped showing up for deposition. And so it’s cases like that are the ones that you get the in-house counsel standing up in mediation saying, "I’m not settling this on generalities when I have the data to prove my case." Those are the fun moments that we get to see because data is all around us, right? You’re leaving around breadcrumbs faster than you know it and more that you know, and we’re able to piece those together to be able to be a better memory than you have.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Scary thought, Hunter. Hunter, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thank you so much.

Hunter McMahon: Thank you too.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: Everyone, check out more episodes of the show and we’ll see you again soon.

Hunter McMahon: Appreciate the time.

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