Transitioning from Big Tech to SME Entrepreneurship with Whitecap's Dan Carmichael

In this episode, Leon chats with Dan Carmichael, the president of Whitecap. Dan tells us about his motivations for leaving a 20-year-long big corporate job at Dell Technologies to join the small business world. Leon and Dan discuss staying on the forefront of emerging technology and Dan gives advice to business leaders on getting involved with AI.

If you’re interested in our Snippets podcasts or The Way Forward live webcasts, please take a moment and visit us at peo-leadership.com. You'll find on our site various previous recorded webcasts with guests such as Stephen Poloz, Avi Goldfarb, Dr. Michael Roizen, Morgan Housel, Jason Selk, and Mitchell Goldhar.   We’ve covered such topics as growth, uncertainty, mental health, leadership, the new world, and a host of others. 

Check out our upcoming PEO Leadership Conference: Adapting to a World of Opportunity, taking place on November 13th and 14th in Toronto. If you’d like to learn more about our leadership community, please feel free to contact lgoren@peo-leadership.com. 

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Transcript

Special thanks to Aird & Berlis for helping us bring you today’s PEO Leadership’s Snippets Podcast.

Welcome to our Snippets Podcast. I'm Leon Goren, CEO and president of PEO Leadership: North America's premier peer-to-peer networking and leadership advisory firm. Today I'm very excited to welcome Dan Carmichael, the president of Whitecap Canada. The company was founded in 1997 by Robb Carmichael and actually has a special place in my heart. I had the opportunity back in 1997, to be one of their first customers while building out a company called JustWhiteShirts.com. They were amazing to work with back then, and have obviously evolved to become an amazing Canadian success story today, with clients such as Toronto Hydro, Woodbine, Drone, Miele, and the list goes on. Dan joined PEO leadership a few years back and as part of an entrepreneurial advisory board led by Miguel Gonzalez, it's been an awesome addition to their group and the greater PEO leadership community. Dan, it's great to have you with us today.

Beautiful, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

So why don't we start with, let's start with Dan. Because when you go through Dan's, your, profile (doing third person here) but when you go through your profile, you left the big corporate job in 2018. And you became really an entrepreneur going into an SME business. And I know in our membership, we always have all these big corporate guys going, yeah, the grass is greener, I'm going to do that. And often, it doesn't work out too well for them. But for you, it's been fantastic. So let me just share some of that experience of what it was like what the decision you made, and maybe even some of the bumps and some of the great moments of doing that change.

Yeah, I love to, you know, it started actually, probably in 2015, when Robb was looking for a successor for Whitecap, I guess he'd met with his board and decided that I might be a great fit. And I think the board agreed at the time. And so he started to sort of courting me if you wouldn't sort of taking me out to dinner and sort of selling me on the idea that I need to come to Whitecap for my future. So you know, I was riding high technologies and things were flying. One of the top account executives, you know, managing the big accounts like Walmart's and Magnet, international, Honeywell, you name it big, huge global accounts. So it was it was such a good experience for me building my career there. But Robb kept coming, and he kept coming hard. And the whole guest corporate landscape is always changing, you know, it always seems to be good reel to reel in the corporate world, you know, one day you need this one day, and he that, from quarter to quarter, it's changing, and there's a lot of different acquisitions and mergers going on. So, you know, after him courting me for a few years, Dell decided to buy EMC, which was one of the largest tech mergers at the time, I think it was worth $64 billion. And we sort of merged with EMC. And that really changed the corporate culture, you know, as despite, you know, Michael Dell, and everybody trying not to change the culture, merging two massive organizations like that did have an effect and a trickle-down effect. And for me, it was sort of, you know, it wasn't really what I wanted to see anymore, it was not really sort of a fit, I thought, you know, this isn't really going the direction I want. You know, it seems like EMC has taken a little far too much latitude and control here in certain areas. And it just to me, it didn't feel right, it didn't smell right. So, you know, I really sat long and hard talk to my wife and family and just said, you know, I think this is what I want to do, you know, I need your support, because this is going to be a tough transition, you know, going from that large, corporately on to, you know, small company with, like, 40 people. So, it was a real tough decision, and probably took me just months of grinding it out in my head to make that final leap and say, Let's do this. So I did, I did in October of 2018, I made the move, I decided, you know, what, I'm going to walk away from this 21 year, you know, successful career at Dell, and, and start a job with my brother in software development, custom software development, which is a little different than what I was doing originally, which was more server storage hardware, you know, end-user computing, with a side of services. Now, I'm moving into a full-service company, new technology for me, you know, sort of the same sort of, I guess, you know, type of selling motions, but very different technology. So, it was good for me because, you know, again, I was learning. You know, it was it reinvigorated my career. At that time in terms of my, you know, growth and personal growth, my interests, you know, my passion every day waking up. Because you know, when you when you were in a job for, you know, 10,15, 20 years, you get really good at it, and you get so good at it, you can probably do a lot of your work without even realizing it, and it becomes very, very, very, you know, like, in sometimes boring, right? If you're not learning, growing. And I kind of felt like that at Dell before I left and moved into the small business world. And I thought this is going to be a huge change, right? This is going to have flipped me upside down, you know, I'm going to need to learn new technology, and a whole new set of people, you know, I'm going from an individual contributor to a people person and a manager, right, where I'll be managing teams. So that was another big aspect for me, that I had to wrestle with.

It was an interesting move, because you didn't jump in as a president. In fact, you did a few years learning the business. Like it was an interesting transition for you, which I see sometimes members, they just jump right into an entrepreneurial role came from bitcore. Right to the President's rule. And I'm not sure that it was that that's probably very helpful in terms of how you transitioned in,

I think it was part of the picture, like the big picture that we talked about, that I talked about with with Robb was that, you know, I need to really learn your business and understand it, you know, I need your mentorship, your guidance, your experience, to help me learn the business before I can really run in operate it. It's it's very different than a large corporate, you know, business where you've got a lot, you know, giant teams, you know, operationalizing, those businesses here, it's just, you know, few small people. And if you don't understand it, it was really important for me to understand the business be in the trenches, as I did, you know, growing up through delt, being in the trenches at Whitecap, growing up learning the whole cycle from A to Z. So I understand what people are going through what they're dealing with on a day to day basis, the challenges, you know, the successes. And I think that humanizes me as a leader, because I really understand now, almost all the roles that Whitecap and how people are dealing with their jobs and day in and day out.

So I wake up, because I don't think people really fully understand even I didn't understand until I was chatting with you the extent of the work you guys do, like you do some very cool stuff. The world is changing very quickly, you're sort of at the forefront. I remember talking to you about drones and going you guys are in the drone business, you're doing software for drones. Now, where did that come from? How's the world about that? Now you've got AI? And I know a lot of us have been looking at AI and trying to pull that in? Where are you guys going with the AI stuff as well?

Well, first off, I think, you know, almost every company these days is a software company. You know, there's some there's software running the world these days. So no matter what you look inside any company and their software, and AI coming out, you know, in November of 2022, sort of really, really broad, sort of some of the efficiencies you can gain by using it. And so yeah, obviously, we are really interested in and we've been using AI to, you know, various levels, you know, already. In fact, you know, many people use AI today and don't even realize it like Google search, you know, Netflix recommendations, Amazon's personal shopper, all these things are all AI enabled, and people are using it. But these these large language models, combined with a natural processing language is just really needed more conversation. All right. And so we decided that, you know, this is something we're interested in, and we need to start advertising this because a lot of companies really need to understand, how do I get into how's this gonna help my business? You know, Where can this plug into existing applications I have? Or how can I develop new ones that are going to take advantage of this maybe to increase efficiencies and processes, help people augment what they're doing today to make their jobs easier. So it was a real big area for us to focus on. So I have these roundtables every Monday with my management team. And we sit down and we talk about, you know, what are the opportunities in front of us and challenges and you know, and AI was one of them, and we thought we all thought we need to be in the front of this we need to jump out and get on this as quickly as possible. So I had some some plans to go into the US which we do business globally anyway, but I had plans to launch a website and the US just to go after that market as well, which we haven't Danielle, part of my expansion plans. But we decided let's park that for a little bit still gonna happen this year. But let's let's get some information out there around AI for our clients or existing clients who are all asking us about this for new customers that are looking to get into AI and really need that help with consulting and integrations. And so we just launched last week or AI website content, and it was good. It's something we needed to do, because our customers were all asking.

So if you're a customer today, because I remember we actually had Avi Goldfarb speak to our members in March. And he's sort of like, open this big black box right about all these opportunities in AI. And at the end, I think a lot of the members sat there and go, Oh, my God, this is great. I wouldn't even know where to start. And then also the big fear of how much money do I actually invest in it? If you're, if I'm a customer coming to you today, Dan? What questions do I need to be asking about what I should be digging into an AI or where should I even go first, to learn a little bit more about it.

But you obviously go to our website, and on our website there under our services and what we offer there, there's a there's a whole section on AI, and sort of how to get started into AI, whether it's for marketing, or human resources or manufacturing, you know, there's a lot of tools that are coming out that are just out of the box that are already going to improve your lives. Many of us use Microsoft already today for Word, Excel, email, etc. And they're coming out with something called co-pilot, and co-pilot is AI enabled, and it's included with your license, which is great. And it's going to help really automate a lot of the processes you may do in your day-to-day work, whether it's helping you respond to emails, or helping you with PowerPoint presentations and jazz in them up, you know, integrating with your CRM system in dynamics. So there's a lot of out-of-the-box stuff that's coming, and you're gonna know how to use it. But there's also a bunch of areas of where can we get involved with AI? And what can what can we do to bring it into our existing applications? And there's a process that we go through to help you upfront and take you through how to how to look at your data out there, you know, how can we help, you know, use that data, and put it into a model, but keep it secure and safe from the public eye because you really don't want your data out there at all. So that's going to be a very important, you know, determination when looking at AI. There's many different things to consider. There's ethical and social impacts around, like I said, privacy, there's bias and discrimination and some of the responses she gets. So how do you deal with that? How you deal with those, you know, ethical dilemmas that may come from the responses you get? And how do you frame that. And so that's something that our team can help with. There's also you know, sort of unintended consequences that can happen, I interacting with other systems, you know, where they're not explicitly trained. So you really got to look at a bunch of factors, when you when you're looking at AI, and then making sure you're using it for good, and for the better your business.

That's great. Well, thanks so much for that. And you know, even to our listeners, at least we've opened the box here, they can actually come to your website, they can give you a shout, especially they're part of the community. I know, you'll take any one of their calls and talk to them a little bit about Yeah, you

know, it's, it's important and it is it's a tough, it's a tough thing to understand and get your head around and you know how much you're going to spend, you know, you can spend very little and get a really cool chatbot that's, that's very communicative two way communication, all about your business, you know, and really save your customer service, a lot of fun, a lot of heartache. They're not like they used to be right. They're very conversational now. And that's not very expensive to get into that. But then there's other things if you're going to train your own models and do your own sort of custom AI, then it can get very expensive.

Thanks so much for joining us today and sharing your insights. And I look forward obviously I got very privileged I get to talk to you whenever I need to. So I continue to learn. If you're interested in our live webcast, the way forward live and or any other snippets, please take a moment visit us at peo-leadership.com. You'll find on our site various previous recorded webcasts which include guests such as Stephen Poloz, Avi Goldfarb, Dr. Michael Roizen, Morgan Housel, Jason Selk, Mitchell Goldhar; the list goes on. and covers topics such as growth, uncertainty, mental health, leadership, the new world, and a host of others. Thank you for joining us all today and check out our upcoming PEO Leadership Conference: Adapting to a World of Opportunity taking place on November 13 and 14th in Toronto. Thanks again.