Chasing Financial Freedom
Chasing Financial Freedom
Ep. 300 | 5 Strategies for Business Success Inspired by Board Gaming Mastery
Imagine owning a treasure trove of 146 board games—Tommy Ogden does, and he's here to share his incredible journey as a board game aficionado. In this episode, Tommy reveals the fascinating evolution of board gaming over the past decade, from the classics we all know to the intricate modern gems like deck-building and worker placement games. Discover what makes the current board game renaissance so exhilarating and how it reshapes our play.
But Tommy's expertise doesn't stop at the game table. As the co-founder of Active Era Consulting, he brings a unique perspective to the business world, drawing parallels between his passion for board games and his professional acumen in project, program, and portfolio management. Learn how he leverages the skills he acquired during his previous tenure at Accenture to drive success in consulting. Get an insider look at what it takes to manage a thriving small firm in today’s competitive landscape.
Lastly, we explore the nuts and bolts of running a consulting business with a local edge in Houston, Texas, especially within the oil and gas sector. Tommy offers valuable advice on balancing supply and demand, targeting service offerings, and the critical role of networking and continuous growth. Whether you're a board game enthusiast or a consulting professional, this episode provides insights and inspiration, inviting you to connect with Tommy for further conversation and collaboration. Don't miss this engaging and informative discussion!
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Hey guys, ryan DeMint from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day. Today on the podcast we have Tommy Ogden. Tommy is a framework aficionado and also the co-founder at Active Era Consulting. Tommy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me Ryan, I appreciate it bit of a wait, so thank you for waiting.
Speaker 1:Look forward to having you on and having a good conversation. So before we get into what you're doing at your business, can you tell the listeners a little bit about who you are?
Speaker 2:Sure, as you mentioned, tommy Ogden, born and raised in Houston, texas, still here after many decades, and I'm a huge board gamer. I don't know if that's the kind of information you're looking for, but I feel like everybody needs to have a hobby or a passion or something that they spend their time and effort and money sometimes too much money on, and for me, that is board gaming. I will talk board games anytime you want, forever. I'm married, I have three kids, I'm trying to get them on the board game train, to varying degrees of effect, but that's me just living, working, hanging out in Houston favorite board game.
Speaker 2:I okay, if you know any, if you have a passion, if you have a hobby, you know that it's challenging to ask somebody that because there's so many different like sub genres, and I don't want to be like that pedantic sort of person. Oh, let me tell you about my craft beer. So I'm gonna go easy on you here and I'll say terraforming mars never even heard of it. It's like one of those things where if you're in the hobby, there's all these different layers and new things and if you, you don't know anything about it, it's. You've likely never heard of the last 12 games I've played.
Speaker 1:So I got it. We'll go into what you're doing, but I got to ask the question board games, how hard are they to find?
Speaker 2:Very easy. They're all over Amazon. There's dedicated sites. I think a lot of it depends on player count. So, for example, a game will say hey, this game is good between two and six players, but if you go online and you look it up, like you would never want to play it at two because it's just too cutthroat. Right, it's just you. It's like a knife in a phone booth fight and you would never want to play it with six because it becomes a slog. Right, you're just. The wait time between your turn is just so much, and so it's really ideal at three or four players. That's one thing to take into consideration when you're looking at games, but you can find them anywhere and everywhere. I would say board gaming is in a middle of a Renaissance, to be honest the last 10 to 15 years has been pretty incredible.
Speaker 1:So they're coming out with new board games, or are they just recycling old ones?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, any everything and all above of what you said. It's the same thing with movies, right? If you take a Monopoly that came out a long time ago and you compare that to a movie that also came out in I don't know, let's say the forties, um, compared to what you get today with visual effects, right. The same thing is happening with board games as it relates to components and art. There's all sorts of interactive mechanisms that you're engaging with. The art is beautiful. There's new mechanics that are coming out as well, things like deck building or worker placement, or even cooperative board games, where you're playing as a group against the board, right. So it's a different world than then. You may know if you've only played life and monopoly, and maybe the most. The newest game most people have heard of is katan, and that came out in 1990, which there's a lot has changed in the last 30 plus years so this is a hobby or is this like a, like passion?
Speaker 1:I guess I'll back up and ask the the the top question, then I'll final. I'll know how many board games do you own?
Speaker 2:I have a database on my phone and I put up. So I actually log all of my plays and I rate all of my games and including expansions, I currently have 146.
Speaker 1:It's more than a hobby. Yes, yep, I think so. Yes, yep, got to have it Cool. I'm sure that helps you disconnect from everything that you're doing in your professional life. So let's get into your professional life. What are you doing there?
Speaker 2:Sure. So, as you mentioned, active Earth Consulting, I'm one of the co-founders there, but I also lead our delivery excellence pillar, which is basically all the project program and portfolio management for our clients. It's also a passion, I would say I was with a. I went back to business school because I actually ended up majoring in Spanish in my undergrad and I didn't really know what to do with a Spanish degree. So I decided at some point I needed to go back and get a little bit more education.
Speaker 2:But as soon as I graduated business school, I went into a boutique firm. There were about 35 people when I joined. This was back in 2013. And by 2018, we'd grown to about 100 people and we actually ended up getting acquired by Accenture, which is, if you know anything about them, they're literally the largest consulting firm in the world. Last time I saw it was 743,000 people. Compare that to the 100 from the firm I was from. So I stayed there for a while. I really enjoyed it Lots of smart people, lots of interesting work but at the end of the day, I just culture wise and for my personality, that wasn't the right environment for me to be in, and actually we got back together with a few folks from the old firm that got bought out and we said let's start Active Arrow Right and let's let's do the 2.0 version of the boutique firm and so we kicked it off April of last year, so it's been about 18 months. It's good because we got a 20 year pedigree in the market already from the old firm and it's been fun.
Speaker 1:So for those that don't know, can we give a little bit of background of what you truly do on a daily basis and then how that would integrate or help small business owners and entrepreneurs?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So for us, we focus down, and I would say that would be a first lesson learned for small business owners. You can't boil the ocean right. You want to be very targeted in who you're going after, and so for us, we are IT advisory and management consulting in oil and gas. So that's how we narrow down our focus of the world.
Speaker 2:And just for those who maybe want a tiny bit more, usually at an organization there's a CIO, right, like a chief information officer, or a chief technical or technology officer, cto and they typically have a portfolio of projects, right, it could be, and they typically have a portfolio of projects, right, it could be. Let's move to the cloud, or let's build a mobile application, or let's get into analytics or whatever it may be. They've got a lot of different things on their plate, but they don't necessarily have all of the people needed to run those programs and run those projects. And so that's where I come in. One client that I'm on right now. They're trying to do infrastructure as code. So normally, if you are going to the cloud, you would go to AWS or Azure and you'd click in and you'd say, oh, I want this server or I want this compute or I want that thing, and you would just click with all the variables that you want, and that causes a lot of challenges, I would say in the environment that you want, and that causes a lot of challenges, I would say in the environment. And so this client is looking to put all of that infrastructure creation into code so that they can be much more consistent, right? So that's just one example of something that we might do.
Speaker 2:And then, as it relates to the small business, right and entrepreneur and focusing, not only have we narrowed it down in who our target is for, who we're going after with sales, but we've also spent the last really six months narrowing down our service offerings, and I would say that's another really important thing. When we first started 18 months ago, ryan, it was like what do you guys do? And we would say strategy, execution, change data, talk about boiling the ocean. That's literally everything in the world when it comes to IT project management. So we've really spent the last six months saying, okay, what are the five things that we are really good at, and let's focus in on those and try to narrow our market so that we can back up what we say.
Speaker 1:That's a struggle that I think all of us entrepreneurs and small business owners have is trying not to take on the world and be able to figure out a way to narrow it down of what you're really doing, because my podcasts are my passion projects, but my day job is an affordable housing developer. But my day job is an affordable housing developer and our number one focus is first time homebuyers in cities and in neighborhoods that have been left behind from pretty much any type of investment, whether it be state funds or private funds. We're very specific in that. It took us a while to get there and that was fantastic a struggle, to say the least.
Speaker 1:So, from your standpoint. The audience is really geared towards entrepreneurs and small business owners. How can you help those individuals or those entities in your current role?
Speaker 2:Are you? Do you mean what can Activera do to help? Are you talking about me personally and advice that I have?
Speaker 1:A little bit of both. Let's start with you and then work into Activerra and the services there.
Speaker 2:Okay, perfectly. So I think we've talked about narrowing down your target. I would say another thing that you need to get right is understanding your supply and demand, and in a consulting business in particular, that looks on the demand side. What projects do you have coming down the pike? That's a big challenge, especially for a small firm. When you've got 743,000 people, you can have some of those people sitting on the bench and not have it affect your bottom line as much. Certainly there's limits to that, just so folks know.
Speaker 2:On the bench just means you're not billing at a client, right, you're not billing at a client, but you're still getting a salary paid to you, right?
Speaker 2:Having somebody who's really good at business development or making sure that the leaders in your company are effective at that, will have that pipeline filled, which is certainly the demand side that you need.
Speaker 2:But on the other side of it you need the supply and in our case it is a people business, right? We're in the business of selling people and you've got to have good people to run those projects and be effective at that. So having a talent manager, someone who's filling your pipeline from that side of the house, someone who's filling your pipeline from that side of the house very key and it's a balance, especially at a small company. You can't have too many people on the bench, because then you've got money going out the door, but you can't have so many projects that you can't fill them, because then you're losing business. And so balancing that supply and the demand, whatever it looks like in your business for consulting it's just what I've described, but it may be a little different depending on what you're selling. But keeping that balance, I would say, is a very important indicator that you should be tracking and paying attention to.
Speaker 1:How do you guys, how would you balance that out? From a business standpoint it's a little different. You can start projecting. I know you were talking about having a pipeline and so forth, but since I've never been a consultant, so it's a question that I look at them. What's the difference? So really you've got. You talked about having somebody that's out there getting the business. Are there actual salespeople that are out or somebody in the on the sales side that's out connecting with potential clients to bring that business in, or is there some other route that you guys go? It's both.
Speaker 2:You've got to have somebody who wakes up every day thinking sales. I would say that's important because they're always going to have that top of mind and they should be incentivized as such. Right? The more new clients they bring, the bigger things that they sell right, that's important. But for a small company in particular, you can't just hire a whole bunch of salespeople. You need to leverage the leaders at your firm to go out and do selling as well. Maybe the Accentures of the world can get away with having just an army of dedicated sales, because they can afford it. But as a small business owner, you've got to do everything For my situation. I'm doing recruiting, I'm doing marketing, I'm doing sales, I'm doing client delivery right, and all the leaders at our firm are doing all of those things. So even though we do have a talent director and we do have a business development sales executive, that doesn't mean that we can't just rest on our laurels, right? We've got to get out there and do our things as well.
Speaker 1:Just out of curious, the person that you have doing the sales and the development side. Does that person come from a consulting background, sales combination of two? Only reason I'm asking is it's when we connect with other businesses they always tell me like on our lending side we have a lending side also. We have business development managers, but they're also licensed loan originators, so they understand the business. So I'm presuming somebody that's doing sales for you guys has the background in your industry as a consultant in that space, or yes, you've got it.
Speaker 2:You've got it Absolutely correct. It's hard to sell what you don't understand. It's also hard to sell what you don't believe in. So I think those are the two things that you've got to have are. The person that we brought in to head up our sales was a technology consultant in a past life. He then transitioned into sales and then he transitioned into our company. So he's done both. He's done consulting, he's done sales at other consulting companies and now he's come over to us, and one of the reasons he came over was through a lengthy interview process where he got to meet everybody and understand more about our service offerings and understand more about our people and, you know, eventually came to the conclusion that he felt that he could be effective in selling this, not only because he understood it, like you're describing, but also because he believed in it.
Speaker 1:The belief in it is a challenge as we go through business development managers and looking at them Believing in where we originate mortgages. You have to believe in being able to give somebody the right product, but you guys have more of a personal connection. I call it personal or intimate connection because you guys are. It's your services that you're offering. So when you guys are out doing your business development, how do you differentiate yourself from being boutique versus the big behemoths? Some people like boutique friends and then some don't. So how do you, how do you play in that realm?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's an area that we've struggled, because any boutique company will have a differentiator of price compared to a bigger firm right. Because those firms, as I mentioned, they've got potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the bench at any given time. They have sales leaders, an army of them that they need to pay their salary, and the way they go about getting those funds is by having like a high margin at a client, and so there's a lot of overhead and you may see more travel at a bigger firm right. So the client's paying for airfare and hotels and all that stuff Given. We're focused in Houston, texas, in oil and gas. The large majority of our clients are here and we don't need those super high margins to cover that overhead and we can essentially pass those savings on to the client. But that's true for any boutique firm as compared to a big. So for us, that's another thing that we've been working really hard on for the last six months. It's not just defining our service offerings, but what's our vision and how do we differentiate ourselves in the market, and the thing that we've focused in on it's really more of a tagline, a motto that we have internally, and it's supported by three subcategories, and so we very simply accelerate business outcomes. That may look different to different clients. Right, as in one client may want to divest something, right, and then we can help them along with that, and it's all about making it clean and clear, cut and crisp and not spending too much money. Another one might be hey, we need this project to succeed and do we need a specific ROI? Right, and so our goal is then to accelerate that outcome, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:We try to differentiate ourselves by being nimble compared to the big folks. Right, we're agile, we can respond quickly. We also want to be easy to do business with. Right, so I don't know if you've ever engaged with certain big companies there's a lot of legal red lines and there's a lot of back and forth and it's challenging sometimes to and we don't, we don't want to be that known for that. So I think those are the three. It's like being a boutique firm, so price or value, really that you're getting ease of doing business with, and nimble and agile, all in support of accelerating business outcomes. So that's how we internalize it. We also have core values and things like that kind of underpin those things. But that's our attempt, at least currently on how we differentiate in the market.
Speaker 1:How well has that been working for you guys?
Speaker 2:I think it's been good, but I don't know that I can attribute it to our choice of words or how we're going about living those things. I think something that's really helped in our case, which it's hard to pass on, is that pedigree that I talked about in the intro right, the fact that we can go to a client and sort of reactivate our LinkedIn network and then come to them and say, hey, remember what we used to be before we were acquired? That's, we're back right, and so they already know us, they already have a concept of what we can provide and what our value is, and not everyone starting up is going to be able to call back to that, and so it's a challenging thing to say, hey, do this. It works. But I do think it's important for you to have a good view of the why right, why are you in existence?
Speaker 2:And that's something we've struggled with recently. Is accelerating business outcomes a good enough why? And, to be honest, we don't think it is. So we are actively working right now. We're, as a leadership team, got a book that we're working on it's called Traction, which allows you to narrow down what your vision is and that why behind your company and what people can get excited behind. Trying to follow the Simon Sinek start with why concept. And people don't buy a product because of the what they buy it, the why behind it, and so that's the next thing we're tackling, just like we tackled the five service offerings and made sure we knew what we were good at. The next thing is how do we be effective at communicating a why?
Speaker 1:You guys are almost like a startup business. You're going through the motions and trying to figure it out and working through very strategic items. I wholeheartedly agree and believe that what you're doing is right and I love what you guys are. You guys are going through that process and small business owners and entrepreneurs I know when I started out as a solopreneur still am, but I've got support staff and so forth I didn't have all that. I just was flying by the seat of my pants and just trying to make it happen. But once you're able to step back, look at a 30,000 foot view of your business and then start putting some milestones in there. What you're trying to accomplish, it changes not just the trajectory of the business but also yourself. You start growing in that sense and the best way I know to describe it is you will continue to refine your offerings, but you don't be hyper focused in where you want to go with those offerings, to where you'll track the right clientele.
Speaker 2:Yep, yeah, absolutely. And targeting those right folks is key because they are the ones that your message is going to resonate with the most. They have the highest probability of purchasing your services, because the things you offer like directly relate to the problems that they're having. And getting to know that persona is important and it is iterative and it takes time, right? The only I would say that we the good thing about having that old company was that on day one, we had I think it was like a 40 page employee handbook. Like we didn't have to build that from scratch, like we already knew about the benefits and the paternity leave and 401ks and all that stuff like that. That was already in the bag. We had templates for statements of work and master service agreements and NDAs, nondisclosure agreements, all that stuff. From that perspective, we didn't have to work that hard. It wasn't like a startup because we already had it.
Speaker 2:But the things that you were talking about that the vision and the core values and the underpinnings and how you narrow that down you can't just start day one and say that thing that used to exist, that started 20 plus years ago, let's just copy paste that. It doesn't work right. You've got different people. You've got different environment right With technology and generative AI and there's different problems on people's minds. So really focusing in on that has not been something we could take lightly or just start with, like we could. Some of that other documentation it's very important for a small business.
Speaker 1:I love all this going under the hood and taking a look at it. So, a little bit, we're coming close to the bottom of the air, but I'd like to be able to get a little bit in on the business itself. I know we talked about specializing and so forth, but can you talk about building out the team and walking through that process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we started actually with a number of co-founders and again they were from that previous firm. So the good thing about that was, I would say there's pros and cons. Right, you said solopreneur. Right, so it was you, and it was you making the decision and it was yeah, it was always unanimous everything you decided. But that's not the case when you've got multiple co-founders and so you've got to put structures in place, legal or otherwise, to just make sure that, let's say, no decision has to be 100% unanimous, or else you'd be paralyzed, locked up in indecision, for an example. So I think that's been a little bit of a challenge.
Speaker 2:And I don't know if you've heard or if your audience has heard there's different stages of any sort of change.
Speaker 2:There's a forming stage and then there's usually a storming stage where you're trying to figure things out, and then they call it norming after that, where things level out and you get a good understanding.
Speaker 2:Then there's the performing phase, ideally assuming you've made it past those first three, and then at some point you break up and it's adjourning, and those are the five phases of pulling something together, and so I would say, 18 months in, we've certainly formed.
Speaker 2:That was the easy part, I would say the storming is probably we're in the middle of it, right, maybe towards the tail end and there's some things that we're still figuring out, but really hoping that, starting in 2025, we can hit our norming stride and then start performing as a group. That's just from the founder's perspective. When it comes to growing the team right, we started in seven, eight people range and now we're up into 25, just 18 months later. So it's been pretty rapid growth and the challenge has been what I mentioned before. It's that supply and demand right, keeping that good balance of folks so that you don't overextend yourself right, but that you're not wearing 20 different hats constantly and aren't able to sell or deliver yourselves. Like I said, pros and cons as with any start startup business, but that's how we've, that's how we've progressed over the last 18 months.
Speaker 1:That's great. And then another or a couple of questions, and we'll wrap this up. Is, as you're bringing on new employees, team members and so forth and you're balancing out that flow, the ebb and flow of work and supply and so forth, how far out in advance are you guys trying to forecast that? Are you guys 90, 120 days out? Are you six months out a year? What do you guys typically look at when you're forecasting?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have different stages that a potential job will go through right. The first is just a lead, and that would be somewhere around three to four months out. I would say that's about as far out as we go. There are some longer term contracts that we have that are typically renewed on an annual basis, and so those maybe are a bit more long lived. But in general, three to four months out you've got a lead. Then you go into qualifying.
Speaker 2:The opportunity is the second stage that we use and that's hey, I know about this thing, let me get more information on it. Let's go out and have a coffee, let's talk more. Let me get some details, and once you do that and that could be an iterative thing, it could be a coffee and then a meeting and then another coffee. Let's just say Then you probably have enough information to submit a proposal. That's the third stage for us, and at that point we've come to financial terms. We understand what problems we're going to be solving and we understand the duration and how many people, and that likely I approved or not. So the next stage stage is is it, did we get a variant right that yes, we're going to move forward with this, but we still have to go through all the legalese and the back office documentation before we can actually get started. And then it's closed one.
Speaker 2:Ideally that we've closed it, we've won the work and we're good to go. At any point during that cycle it can be ousted and the closed lost, and we try to keep a track of the reasons why we lost. So whenever you close it was it a relationship, was it a competitive bid and we didn't win because we weren't differentiated enough, or whatever it may be and we take a look at that on an annual basis. Probably should take a look at it on a quarterly basis to react better. But we're still young. So looking at the end of the year and just saying what kind of happened and how we, how can we continuously improve? You know that's? I would say that's an important iterative process as well. That's how we go through our work.
Speaker 1:Cool, I'm going to ask and you can tell me yes or no Clients need to be located in the Houston area if they're looking to work with you guys.
Speaker 2:No, we, just because it's oil and gas right. A lot of them are, but we actually have a couple of consultants out in Denver because in the Rockies there's some oil and gas out there. We have someone in Mississippi. Post-covid virtual work has grown right and so we've adapted to that as well. We even have a client. I believe our managing partner is up in Minnesota this week doing a discovery workshop with a new client, and we're open At the old firm, the one we had prior to this I described. I actually, even though we were a hundred people, I actually owned our Kazakhstan account, so we had business in Kazakhstan randomly and then I'd go out there every quarter and manage that business, and so I don't think there's really a limit of where we could or would go. It just so happens that, since we're so focused on oil and gas, houston is usually where the work is.
Speaker 1:Got it. And if people want to reach out to you, where's the best place to connect with you? We?
Speaker 2:have a contact page on our ActiveEraConsultingcom which you could reach out and that would get routed. Or you could connect with me on LinkedIn. If you search Tommy Ogden, I'm the first thing that pops up, so happy to continue the conversation with anyone who wants to.
Speaker 1:Awesome, sir. Thank you for coming on. It's been a great conversation. Love to hear what you guys are doing, but you guys have taken from a startup to really flowing through and it sounds like you guys are going to kick off 2025. Quite well, that's the plan. All right, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you, ryan.
