Today’s episode features two special guests. Alex Reed is the Co-Founder & President of Fluence Analytics. He’s also a mentor to local entrepreneurs and very active in the New Orleans, Houston and Portland communities. Jay Manouchehri is the CEO and Board Director at Fluence Analytics. Jay has more than three decades of global experience in technology commercialization. Together, they sit down and join host Valerie Cobb to talk about ways growing companies can increase their revenue.

Takeaways

• One way to get out of the revenue maze is to listen to your customers. If you get them talking and actually listen to them, they will tell you exactly what they need.
• Don’t feel like you need to sell all the bells and whistles. If you listen to a customer and work collaboratively then the sale will come back to you.
• You want to make the lives of your customers easier, so you need to find the right client so they can work with you.
• There is a balance between having the sales person come in with all different requests or focusing too much on your product market fit and ignoring your customers.
• Collaborating with other parts of the team allows you to figure out what works best and how to improve your company.
• Part of being strategic allows you to narrow down the things that won’t work, so you can focus your energy on things that will work.
• With two people working together on something, you get two ways to analyze the problem and find a solution.

Quote of the Show:

1:26 “One of the best things I would say is to listen to your customers. Because if you get them comfortable, you get them talking and you actually listen, they’re gonna tell you exactly what they need from you.”

Links:

• Alex’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-reed-504/
• Jay’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmanouchehri/
• Website: https://www.fluenceanalytics.com/

Ways to Tune In

• Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• Google Podcast – https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s
• YouTube – https://youtu.be/t28zvphg17k

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Things My Customer Said Today – Alex Reed & Jay Manouchehri – The Revenue Maze

I am super excited because I have two guests. These guests are so much fun. The first guest is a mentor and local entrepreneur. He’s also a tech entrepreneur himself. He is active in the New Orleans, Houston, and Portland areas. He’s a Cofounder and President at Fluence Analytics. Welcome, Alex Reed.

Thanks, Valerie. I’m excited to be here.

I’m so excited for you to be here. We’ve got to introduce our second guest. The second guest has more than three decades of global experience in technology commercialization. He is highly skilled at business development, a man after my own heart because that is very difficult. He is the CEO and Board of Directors at Fluence Analytics. Jay Manouchehri, I am so excited to have you here.

Thank you, Valerie. Happy to be here.

Alex and Jay, we always start this with one question. What is one thing that readers can do to help themselves get out of the revenue maze?

I had to think about this one. One of the best things I would say is to listen to your customers if I had to say it succinctly. If you get them comfortable, you get them talking and you actually listen, they’re going to tell you exactly what they need from you. That’s what you use to solve their problems.

That is so simplistic, but I struggle with that. I’m going to say I’m always listening for the second, “What am I going to say next? I’m a little nervous about saying something next.” I agree 100%. If you can listen, that’s amazing. Even though it’s simple, sometimes people need some steps on how they can actually do that. What are your thoughts?

Let Jay answer the question, too, what his take is on it on the revenue maze.

You hit the nail on the head, Alex. It’s to listen. Sometimes, what I’ve noticed is we listen but we’re not truly hearing. Listen and walk a mile in the customer’s shoes. How would I add value? How would I solve this pain point? Be empathic to it. In business terms, we call it collaborative. Listen, roll your sleeves up, and see how we could add value or how we could overcome obstacles and challenges. That’s what it’s all about.

I’m just not quite sure. When you’re trying to listen to hear, sometimes people have the audible portion of that, but I’ve heard people say, “Listen to understand.” I think that a lot of us struggle with that. We want to start making our points.

Especially in sales, I think you’re right, Valerie. You want to have all the answers. You want to be there and you want to fill all those awkward silences and blank spaces with your pitch and your stuff. In addition to what Jay was saying, which was spot on. It’s part of why we work so well together. The way I’ve found to really listen is to be curious if you’re genuinely curious about who you’re with.

This applies to me in every aspect of life, not just when I’m talking to a customer. Everyone is very passionate about something. If you can go find what they’re passionate about, you’re going to learn from them. For me, curiosity is to pull that out of people. Ask them questions. If you can be genuinely curious, you’re going to listen. You’re going to hear something that is going to be very valuable. Not just for your sale, but maybe you might learn something and they might introduce you to someone else. At the end of the day, it’s a good design for living.

Everyone is passionate about something. If you can find what they’re passionate about, you will learn from them.

I’d like to add to that. That’s true in all facets of life. What you said, Valerie, from the business perspective, a lot of times, salespeople want to go push the benefits and features, and bells and whistles. It’s not about that. It is, but it’s not. It’s listening and then seeing, “How can I add value? How can I solve the problem?” Work collaboratively, and then do that.

If it’s not it, the time might be wrong or they’re not at that stage. No need to try to do the hard sell because it will come back to you. If you’re solving the real problem, the value itself will unravel itself. That’s what Alex was talking about. Curiosity and collaboration would help both sides jointly arrive at the right answer to move forward.

That’s so interesting because we talked about collaboration. I love the words that you guys said, curiosity and all of those kinds of things. If you are genuinely curious, then you don’t care if you go to a hard sell anyway. At the end of the day, I say this all the time, people buy for their reasons. They don’t buy for your reasons or anybody else’s reasons.

The reality when we talk about that is talking about uncovering some of their reasons. Sometimes they don’t even know their reasons until you’re curious about what they’re doing in their world. Also, you’re being that good human that tries to solve that pain that you’re saying. As a company, you guys would have that circle back in the benefits of the revenue.

You’re coming up with good products and all those things by listening. You are also getting a following because they understand that you are interested in their benefit, not just yours. I do like that. Being an entrepreneur, both of you, as you guys work into business development and stuff like that as well, hasn’t that helped you in the past to come up with these new companies? I’d love to hear from you about that.

It’s the curiosity and what you just described. I’ll tell a little bit of the story of how our company came to exist because it was rooted in what you’re describing. We were an idea at a research institute at Tulane in New Orleans. My dad is a Physics professor. He’s the inventor of all these technologies. I grew up working with him in the lab.

I did enough work in the lab that I knew I didn’t quite want to be a scientist or engineer. I liked the technology and the science but I was far more passionate about the commercialization. How do you go from idea to product broadly distributed to solve pain points in society rather than staying in the lab and doing research? That was how we got started.

To root back to your question, the reason it was viable was because the work we were doing there at Tulane was being funded by these large petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies who are now our customers. Even before we had a product, we had an idea and technology that these companies were funding because they saw the value.

We were listening and said, “You find value here. We have these patents. We’re doing this research. What if we could box this up, take these concepts, and turn it into a product?” We were very fortunate that we had a very collaborative customer in the beginning. We started our company doing a joint development with a customer paying us to do the initial product development to solve their pain point.

It was birthed exactly with curiosity and listening. Finding a pain point opportunity took this out of a lab into a company. We scaled it, we raised venture money, and we then moved to Houston. I’ll tell the story of how we pulled Jay in later, but I hope he still likes me after I did that. Anyway, that’s a little bit of the background.

We’re good, Alex. Don’t worry.

Thank you. To answer your question, it’s curiosity, listening, learning, and then turning it into products. It’s continual because as you continue to learn and listen to your customers, they’re going to tell you where your product needs to go. It should never be static. You have a product now, but that should be going and growing to meet other needs and pain points. Jay?

You summarized our history well. What you summarized with the history of the company, you summarize the history of my career. I’m an engineer and I like to make things better. Early on, how do you get technology to optimize things and make them better? That was my simple way of making the world better. I grew up in an industry that’s not environmental-friendly.

My view is we’re going to need plastics and gasoline. I am an environmental kind of person, so I care about it. My view is that I could optimize the process and lower energy consumption, waste, and emissions. Making it run better is doing my passion and tinkering. That’s what I was doing with my career, and that’s how we connected.

That’s where the challenge and opportunity come. Going back to what you mentioned earlier, Valerie, customers sometimes don’t know. In the terms of technology, part of our mission is awareness. We have this grace mousetrap that solves a problem. Now we got to get the message out, and then find the right audience to collaborate with to solve that problem.

That’s exactly what Alex did when he started the company because the technology and the product are real. He found a client that had that pain and they understood it. They collaborated together to create the first generation of our product from a set of concepts, drawings, and patents into a working industrial product.

What I like about what you guys are saying is, in my haunts, I’ve always been on the revenue side. I’ve been a business owner and entrepreneur as well in startups. There are things that I find when I get into smaller companies that need help. When I say smaller, they could be a resurrection, $5 million and up, or they can be a well-funded startup that I enter into.

At the end of the day, what I find as one of their biggest problems is they start the way that you guys are starting, but for some reason, they can’t translate that to the culture. A salesman starts coming back going, “The customer wants this.” The salesman wants it because or the salesman comes back and says, “The customer wants this.” Leaders start to go, “They don’t need that.”

I see both sides of the fence when it comes to that. With the listening portion of it, they shut down themselves to the curiosity once they’ve started, especially in the resurrection space where Alex was talking about doing it over and over again. You might have a minimal and viable product, but your product’s never done. It’s because society is always changing and their needs are always changing. It seems to me that the advice that you’ve been giving about that, listening, rinsing, repeating, and the way you guys started your company, is the model or the format that would perpetuate excellence and keep your company constantly growing.

You hit some interesting points because it is very difficult to translate it to the culture. I’m not going to say that we do it perfectly. Nobody does. It’s a fine line when you’re running a technology business to say you have that minimum viable product. You know there’s a need for it and there’s a market. You got to stay the course and not get distracted.

Build some momentum, and then try to instill enough process that you’re not getting too diluted, so that you can do those revisions, capture the additional market, and scale. The flip side of it is the salesman coming with all these feature requests, this and that. You’re letting a salesperson dictate your roadmap, and then you can end up in a very different place.

That’s the balance that the executive needs to handle, the person or the team running the company. I think the best way to do that is those key people need to be talking to customers regularly. If those people are not talking to customers, that’s a problem, especially in those early years. Honestly, even very large companies, the CEO’s job or the key people in the business, they’re dealing with customers at a high level and listening to the customers still. It’s a carved-out portion of their time. That is a big important piece. Jay, I’m sure you have something you want to add to that.

We’ve been through it ourselves. What advice I will give and my thought to any company, every organization needs a straight man.

The Good Cop, Bad Cop.

To that end, I think the question that all of us need to ask ourselves when those situations come up is the real problem. Are we the best people to solve that problem? Can we solve that problem? How do we add value to the customer and ourselves? Are we going to reach from a bridge too far for us that will stretch us too far, or not?

The next thing is, we have ten things on our plate. Are we going to defocus ourselves? That’s where it’s an executive team decision. I would like to take that into another segment. Some years ago, when I was originally turning around the business and running the engineering company, the sales guys will go out and do exactly what you said. Stick a price on it, and then come and give it to operations and say, “There you go.” Operations will say, “The salesman sold it. It’s not my problem. We’re losing money.”

What I did as I was fixing that, I said, “We’re going to have a little bit of internal friction. It is good.” This was like an engineering solution. “Sales team, you cannot put a proposal out with a price without operations giving a detailed breakdown, cost structure, etc.” They’ll say, “It’s too expensive.” I said, “Good.” You bring it to management.

Fortunately, I’ve done those projects. I say, “Do you really need so many hours to do this?” That’s one lever, you rationalize it, then you play with the margin and off you go. It’s that friction, collaboration, and working together. As you do these cycles, the team learns and becomes better. Next time there’s a similar project, you don’t have to go through all those gyrations. I know it’s a little bit off-topic of what we were talking about.

No, it was actually on-topic because we started talking about how to improve something and get them out of the revenue maze. There’s always that dynamic. I’m going to add to that, Jay. There’s always the straight guy. When you’re saying the straight man, you’re meaning the guy that watched probably all the analytics and says, “This isn’t efficient,” and all that kind of stuff.

I’m going to say there’s the visionary that stretches that straight person or whoever is in that role a little bit. There’s always that give and take between operations and sales. There’s always the pushback on the press point. There are some that will think things are cheap by the price and others who think they’re expensive by the price. That’s just human nature. I love exactly what you were saying. It has to do with also listening to your team because you said it builds that team.

Also, on a higher level, Valerie, it goes through a strategy. I used to be a strategy and manager consultant in the past life. One thing about strategy is a good portion of it knowing what you’re not going to do. The thing about strategy is you can’t do everything and be everything for everyone. What is it you’re not going to do for the reasons that you have? Not doing certain things is a good strategic move.

Absolutely. Alex, you were talking about the executives listening and being part of that whole process that Jay has laid out, that was exactly my roots and I’m old, so this will explain it. When I graduated college, my first out-of-college job was at Nordstrom. Nordstrom required every executive once a month to sell on the floor. That was their thing. Every single month to hear what the customer was doing. It helped because they always were in tune with it. I agree 100% with what you’re saying, too. You had something. I interrupted you, Alex. Go ahead.

It creates two things. 1) That constant pulse on that changing environment. 2) That empathy that Jay was talking about. If you know what customers are asking and you know what they want, you’re developing that empathy. It’s not static, just like everything else. Things change, so you need to keep working that muscle out to make sure that it’s a lens that you’re constantly viewing the decisions you have to make through.

At the end of the day, if you’re not adding value to a customer whether it’s B2B or B2C, you don’t exist. The whole point of the business is to create value. Anyway, I think that’s the fundamental root of sales and everything we’re talking about. You have to find the way to add value, and shift and change to make sure you’re constantly adding new value.

I want to know a little bit more about what brought you guys to Fluence Analytics. It doesn’t have to start with that, but I’m curious and the audience is always curious about where an entrepreneur comes from and all of that stuff. I would love to hear this.

I told the genesis story a little bit earlier out of my dad’s lab and how we got going. In this next part, we could talk about how I got Jay, this guy with all this great experience to come in.

That’s a good sales pitch. It’s that whole, “Where do I get this off the ground,” that whole mad scientist sort of thing.”

I’m a first-time entrepreneur. I’ve been very fortunate to have awesome mentors and great supporters. There are so many people to thank and list. At a certain point in the middle of the pandemic, we had been doing things and we were looking to grow. We needed to go that next level, so I went to the board. I said, “I think we need to bring in somebody that knows this industry and has a lot of experience to step in as CEO. I want to help find that person and support him. I’ll shift and do commercial things. I’ll be there for him, but I’ll bring him in to work with you guys to get him spun up.”

They agreed and the board said, “Let’s go do that.” We worked together and found Jay. Jay is interesting because most people when they work at a big company for a long time, they’re ruined for a startup. I’m going to be as blunt as you can be. It’s because you have way too much support, and way too many resources. A startup is a whole different mindset.

It’s not like, “I have a team to do that and this.” You got to figure out how to get it all done quickly. That’s one of the advantages. You’re more agile and you can do things. Jay was that perfect blend. Having that experience at big companies, doing some different things in private equity, M&A, and consulting. He was crazy enough and had the guts to come do a startup and help take us to the next level, so it was a perfect fit. The best thing is we work very well together. I’ll tell one last story about how we got to him because it’s one of these crazy world stories.

That’s a funny story.

Everyone agreed. I activate the search. I go to all these people, people I tried to hire before, this and that. One of those people I tried to hire before introduced me to this guy who Jay had worked for many years ago when he was running Middle East for ABB. I literally went halfway around the world to get to Jay, and then we have our first call. It’s like a two-and-a-half-hour intro call. We were just hitting it off. It comes out that he’s from New Orleans. He went to Tulane. We know twenty mutual people. I was like, “Jay, why the heck did I have to go halfway around the world to some guy that you worked for in the Middle East to find you? I literally could have picked up the phone and found you this way.”

What did I tell you, Alex?

What did you say?

I said it’s a good thing you didn’t connect to them fast. They were my college drinking buddies.

He did say that. We might not be here.

Actually, it shows great tenacity. You went all the way around the world.

You got to do whatever it takes. I want to hear Jay’s perspective.

Alex, I think we’ve talked about it. He’s doing all this pitch, “I’m from New Orleans. It’s my alma mater. I would love to them.” I said, “Alex, you don’t need a CEO. You’re doing a great job.” He shared some documents. This is after the first meeting. I signed the NDA and he signed it. I said, “My advice to you is, at best, you need a COO. I understand what you’re trying to do. Augment to scale up industrialization. You need that knowledge set.”

He tells me, “That’s too complicated. Be the CEO and I’ll work for you. I’ll go run the commercials, CCO.” That made a difference for me. It’s not easy. It’s like raising your child and giving it to someone else to raise it. That was the watershed moment for me. This guy has great maturity and already is a great CEO. What that means is you got to do what’s best for your business. The same thing I was saying for the customer. If at some point I have to move out of the seat for the company to excel, a great executive will do that. They say, “Now, I’m going to go and be on the board, be the president, or do something else.” It’s because you got different stages in the life cycle of a company to do that. That was the watershed moment for me.

That’s a great character on Alex’s part, first of all, because that is one of the hardest things. Sometimes when you’re doing that, Jay, which is a great character for you as well. I’ve done that in my business as well. I’ve got three people that I turned away and said, “You need this first. I’m not going to be able to help you right now, but I’ll be in the wings. If you need help, then go ahead and give me a shout.”

I think one of the hardest things with what you just said was so many people want that title versus wanting the company to grow. It shows Alex’s curiosity. It shows that he listens. It shows that he wants the best for his customers because he needs that out there. He hired a Rockstar, it sounds like to me, and he’s a Rockstar, too.

He’s the best for his company. It’s his baby that he started. I told him, “You’re not going to get off the hook.” I had done CO in the past so I said, “We’re going to do it together.” It’s been a great journey. I’ve learned a lot from him. Things that I’ve done differently in the past life. I see that they’re doing it differently here and it makes sense. It’s been a very collaborative and enjoyable journey, but not easy.

There’s type one and type two fun. I’m sure you’ve heard this. Type one is you’re relaxing on the beach or you’re hanging out in vacation. Type two is the hard stuff you do and look back fondly on when it’s over. You say, “That was fun.” When you’re in it, maybe it’s not so fun because it’s hard, but that’s what’s most rewarding. The hard stuff is what’s rewarding.

I’ve got my daughter’s wedding next week. I’m going to look back at it very fondly. I love it. Basically, you guys started listening to the customer. Alex got a good dose of humble pie, and the right motivations and goals to growing the company. You get a good co-founder in Jay. You guys work like yin and yang. Explain how this helps other people.

What it really is, it’s not an easy thing to do, first of all, the co-management, and then we’ll work back to how we do it. The fundamental end result of how it helps people is when you can have this type of arrangement where it’s complimentary. There are different two extremely engaged people respecting each other and working together. The end result for the business, and therefore the customer, it’s multiples better than it would be with one person which is a more typical format. We think that doing it this way has been what’s best for our company and our customers. It’s been a hell of an experience.

We learn from each other. The way that I would like to say, Valerie. First of all, Alex and I start the day. Most of the time, we do a desync and wrap up, and then depending on the day, multiple times during the day or at the end of the day. A lot of times, I said, “Alex, I don’t have the answer right now. Let me ruminate on it. Let me sleep on it.” The reason we do it in the morning, they are issues that are not resolved. We sleep on it and then we recalibrate in the morning. Another thing is sometimes slow is fast. Basically, what I’ve noticed is that we’re making decisions too fast. My dad taught me that. He says, “Whenever you make a decision, you made your decision, just don’t act on it. Sleep on it overnight one night, and then wake up in the morning. If you still feel the same about it, proceed.”

What happens is our neural net in the back while it relaxes, it reanalyzes that decision. A lot of times, it comes with a better answer. That’s why we connect in the morning. We routinely do. How a co-manage works, just to give an example before we go into the details. Imagine you have one eye. You could reach for something, you could overshoot it or undershoot it because you have one angle on it. With a co-manage, you have two eyes, so you could get depth perception. You get a better view. What I like to use as an example is, “What do you see?”

If you only have one eye, you could overshoot or undershoot something. With a co-manager, you have two eyes and a better depth perception.

A pen.

A point of a pen.

A point of a pen that the people who are reading cannot see, so I’m describing it.

If you look at it from another angle, it’s a pen or a line, right?

Yeah.

That’s what the two people looking at it. It gives you two ways to analyze it to get a better answer and not jump to a conclusion that’s maybe not the whole story.

As Alex said, his mind doesn’t stop all night, and it’s the pain of waiting, too.

Yes, and that’s a good thing. Actually, we say that. We commiserate. That process of commiseration to figuring things out is the working process of polishing and getting a better solution, decision, and process out the window. This process will not work. It’s not for the faint-hearted. If there isn’t mutual respect and trust between the parties and then willingness to piggyback ideas back and forth with no judgment. Also, willingness to completely rely on the other person. You do these team-building exercises. They say, “Close your eyes, and jump. Just know that your team is going to catch you.” That’s exactly what me and Alex is. That came to a test early when we started. Alex had his son. There were some complications and he was in the NICU for a couple of weeks.

He’s good now.

Good. I’m like, “Wait a minute. You can’t move on.”

No, he’s good. Don’t worry. Keep going, Jay.

Basically, we had just started this. We were doing sessions prior to that during Christmas and New Year’s. I had the whole team working during the holidays, long hours to get ready for the next year. This was in late January that this happened, and I was just early on. I said, “Alex, don’t even worry about it. You just check out completely,” which he didn’t, “Leave it to me.” Had we done that and we did not have that trust, for those few weeks, the whole company would’ve come to a grinding cult.

Excellent story. Tell me about what the Fluence Analytics group can expect from all of this. Tell the audience about Fluence, just a little bit about what you guys are doing differently.

I alluded to it earlier, but we work with petrochemical and biopharmaceutical companies. These are companies working at the forefront of materials and biologics the next therapies. What we do is we provide a turnkey solution to help them optimize their production process. Realtime analytics from measurement through analysis. With that, they’re able to improve their yield, efficiency, and cost.

Basically, we help them make it better, cheaper, and faster. We’re doing that in the polymer space. What’s interesting now is that we’re focusing on the future, which is plastic upcycling. Not trying to mechanically recycle it, but take that waste plastic, go back to the original molecule, and then reprocess it. We’re trying to work with some companies that are at the forefront of that so we can truly have a circular economy instead of a lot of waste plastic. Those novel therapies, the proteins, peptides, and mRNA, changed our lives. We’re working with these companies that are leading the charge of the future. We’re a humble enabler with our technology. That’s what we do.

That’s very interesting because there are a lot of data analytic companies out there, but what gap did you guys see in the industry that made it so different?

I’ll say my bit from where I was starting, and then Jay can say what he saw over decades of the industry because that was another piece that connected us. What I saw was talking with those customers. They’re in this polymer space. They take manual samples. Take a little vial sample, go to a lab, make a test, go back, and make another test.

They’re doing this every 2 or 4 hours. This is 2022. This is still how we’re running pretty complex high-value assets that make the supply chain work. These are vital materials to our modern life. I was shocked because I’m not from the industry. I see this and I’m like, “People are doing it? We don’t have a better way.”

What we’re doing is taking what was in that lab, making it a smart system, putting it next to the reactor, and doing continuous real-time measurement of what now has done offline every hour. We’re doing it continuously every second. With that new data, they’re able to then do what I said before, make it better and more efficient. Jay, do you want to jump in with the problems you saw?

When Alex told me that story, that was our first call, I immediately got it, because that’s what I spent my career doing. Advanced process control, digital transformation of the process industries, and within energy and refining, you could do that. One area that we couldn’t apply those technologies to was polymerization, the polymer industry, because of the inherent dynamics of those processes.

That was a big challenge that people had a lot of scars trying to solve with different methods in the past and were not successful. When I saw what Alex and the phone team are doing, I immediately got it. I immediately saw the value and the niche in the market that no one else has been able to do. Now, you’re solving a real pain point and the need is there, so what more do you want?

Sometimes, educating people to know that it’s there and that they have the need.

There are all other factors. There are timing, what’s trendy, and enabling technology. You’re right. It’s not all a great idea in pain point.

I do love it though. When you were talking about that and Jay, you were talking about digital transformation, sometimes people will think that, for instance, healthcare is cutting edge, but they’re quite antiquated in adopting. Some of that has to do with government regulations. I’ve worked in heavy equipment manufacturing as well.

The construction industry, for all its trucks and their cool equipment, they are very behind on a lot of systematic processes and digital transformation. Yet you can scream to the cows come home, how that will help save them, improve bids, save them time, money, etc. The pain of the same seems to not be greater than change at that point. I’m curious how you guys got past it.

Valerie, you’re describing the human condition. No one likes change. That’s why it’s fun to be a change-maker.

No one likes change. That’s why it’s fun to be a change-maker.

Yes, it is. It is always engaging. I laugh because when you’re coaching sales teams, they’re almost the worst with it. You’ve got to do change management every day. You are change agents every day of your life.

It’s funny you say that when you said healthcare and change agents. Early on, we’re going through the stuff, that first period that I was talking about to get ready for the first board meeting. It’s because then, I got to come to tell the board, “Where are we going to take the company?” I’m looking through some stuff and we had this other product.

I said, “Alex, what’s this?” He says, “We had this, and then the board said, ‘You’re a startup. Focus on one thing.’” This was for the biopharma industry. It uses the same underlying IP but solves a different problem within the biopharma industry. I said, “This is biopharma. They have more money than God.” He says, “If you tell that to the board, they’re going to give you a hard time.”

I said, “No problem. I’m going to do this. I’m going to keep it as my secret weapon in my back pocket.” Sure enough, at the end of the first board meeting, one of the board members asked, “We have this other thing. Jay, what do you think about this?” I said, “Yes, we’re going to take that off of the cabinet and we’re going to spruce it up and relaunch it,” because it’s the way to go.

Amazingly, it’s been taken off. That product within that industry touches all of our lives because it helps in the formulating of vaccines, peptides, mRNA, and DNA. Technology is now the way to make the new vaccines that are coming out. We’re at the forefront of that. Ever since we relaunched that, it’s taken off like hotcakes.

That’s an amazing success story. One of the things I want to do is I always like to know, and I know the audience like to know. What are you guys passionate about outside of the business realm? What do you guys like to do for fun? You said tier one fun, and then you said tier two fun. Now, we’re in tier two fun here. What’s your tier one, like on the beach or that kind of fun stuff?

I’ll go first because I know Jay’s got to think about this one a little bit.

Is he a fun hater on tier one?

No, he’s a type-two guy. It’s funny you say that because I got this question from an early investor and it stumped me. I literally froze because all I did was this company 24/7. It’s all I thought about. I didn’t do anything else.

You were a tier-one fun hater.

Exactly. Overtime, there are some realizations. That’s not sustainable for most people forever. You’d go through ebbs and flows, and so you find that sweet spot, and then you find ways to add balance, etc. You still are thinking about it 24/7, but you can have type one fun here and there. If you want to have a relationship with a significant other, I got married, and now we have a son. A lot of the little bits of free time I have, I spend with them hiking and doing things like that. The other bits are helping other entrepreneurs solve their problems. My type one fun sometimes is to gravitate towards other people’s type two. I love learning about other businesses and technology, so I like to help do that stuff.

That can be tier one. That’s when you work out every morning and do a new book. It’s a tier one for me. Jay, are you a fun hater or not?

No, I’m not a fun hater. It’s just that I’m a boring guy. What I do is my passion. I like to find difficult problems, situations, and companies. I immerse myself and solve it. My fun one is what Alex said that he likes to do with the other entrepreneurs. I like to do that with my team. When I see the light bulb go up in people’s eyes, or people’s careers take off or develop, it makes my day. I get charged because it’s like you planted a tree. It’s going to go, generate, and make changes. My fun is walking and music.

Actually, Jay could party if you get him in the right environment.

Does he go to Cat’s Cradle in New Orleans?

If you have to pick a place, Pat O’Brien’s is his place. Right, Jay?

No comment.

I was going to say there’s got to be some kind of whatever passion out there. Jay, you and I have something in common because I sang opera for eighteen years and I loved coaching it as well. When we’re talking music, I love music. Definitely, from both of you guys, I totally love that you immerse yourself in tier two fun and have tier one fun become tier two. We’ll coin that phrase. Let’s have a tier one, tier two.

I can’t take credit. I saw it on LinkedIn somewhere. I don’t want to take credit for it.

That’s great because helping people is the kind of stage I’m at. I love the fact that it would resonate really well with the next generation. I don’t even know what Pew Research is calling it these days because they changed it several times. I won’t even venture to gen-something I think instead of Millennial. If it’s Gen Z-ers or Gen A-ers, I don’t know. Anyways, that’s so fascinating. What I would love the audience to know is where can they get ahold of you because it’s exciting what you guys are doing at Fluence.

You can go to our website, FluenceAnalytics.com if you want to check out what we’re doing. You can find me Alex Reed on LinkedIn. That’s the easiest to get ahold of me.

You’re going to get blown up with connection requests. I’ll make sure that when this posts there, we blow it up. Jay, where is the best place to get ahold of you and Fluence?

LinkedIn is good. Jay Manouchehri on LinkedIn or through our website.

That’s awesome. I want to thank the audience for reading and learning about this fantastic leadership group. Learning about Fluence a little bit and some of the ways that we can get out of the revenue maze and help each other. Thank you so much for reading. Thank you, again, Alex and Jay. This has been fantastic.

Thank you, Valerie.

Thank you, Valerie. It’s been fun.

Important Links

• Fluence Analytics
• Tulane
• Pew Research
• Alex Reed – LinkedIn
• Jay Manouchehri – LinkedIn
• https://Music.Amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• https://Open.Spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• https://Podcasts.Google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s

About Alex Reed

Alex Reed is the founding CEO of Fluence Analytics (acquired by Yokogawa Electric Corporation), a technology company that delivers hardware/software systems for continuous process analytics enabling realtime optimization of manufacturing and R&D processes. He now serves as the President and Chief Commercial Officer. Prior to founding Fluence Analytics, Alex worked as the Associate Director for Operations and Strategy at Tulane-PolyRMC.

Alex served on the boards for the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition and the Applied Polymer Technology Extension Consortium. In 2016 Forbes recognized Alex as a 30 under 30 recipient, and he has been recognized with several local and regional entrepreneur and innovation awards.

Alex is active in the New Orleans, Houston and Portland communities, regularly mentoring local entrepreneurs, students and faculty on the commercialization of technology as well as entrepreneurship.

About Jay Manouchehri

Jay Manouchehri is the Chief Executive Officer of Fluence Analytics, a technology startup that provides real-time analytics solutions for the optimization of manufacturing and R&D processes. He has more than three decades of global experience in technology commercialization, scale-up, digitalization, operational effectiveness and digital transformation within the chemicals, energy and process industries. Throughout his career, Jay has performed due diligence and technology scouting for private equity groups, led technology development and commercialization efforts with startups, and reorganized corporate business units and subsidiaries.

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