Adam Torres and Brad Weber discuss building businesses.
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Show Notes:
Building an inspiring business is the goal of many entrepreneurs. In this episode, Adam Torres and Brad Weber, President & CEO at InspiringApps, explore Brad’s journey building InspiringApps and the book he recently released, Mission Matters: Mission-Based Leaders Share Inspiring Stories on Leadership and Success (Best of Edition, Vol. 1).
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About Brad Weber
As the founder and CEO of InspiringApps, Brad take great pride in leading a team of experts who are passionate about designing and building high-quality mobile, web, and custom apps. They specialize in enterprise business solutions, custom web and mobile applications, hardware (IoT) and SaaS integration, complex data solutions, product strategy, UI/UX design, and emerging technologies.
Brad background spans 30+ years of experience as a software developer and entrepreneur. Having successfully founded four different technology companies, his goal for InspiringApps is to tackle large, complex problems with custom solutions that bring the most innovative digital products to market.
InspiringApps has served established financial institutions like Capital One and Fidelity National Financial, global enterprises like Google, Lockheed Martin, and Toyota, and startups in many verticals, helping clients to bring their digital dreams to life. They were recently honored as an Inc. Power Partner by Inc. Magazine for their B2B excellence.
Their commitment to creating a positive and inclusive work environment that fosters innovation and creativity has not gone unnoticed. InspiringApps has been recognized as one of the Best Places to Work by Built In Colorado and is a certified Great Place to Work. Their work has won our clients numerous awards, including Innovation By Design (Fast Company), Webby, AVA, Tabby, Davey, and BMA nominations.
About InspiringApps
InspiringApps builds digital products that help companies impact their employees, customers, and communities. Yes, they build web, mobile, and custom apps, but what they offer is something above and beyond that. What they offer is inspiration. Their award-winning work has included 200+ apps since the dawn of the iPhone. Their core values: integrity, respect, commitment, inclusivity, and empathy. They guarantee: finish line, every time, for every project.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today is a special day. Maybe even, I don’t know, Brad, a commemorative episode.
I don’t know. We’re celebrating the launch of our very first audio book as a company. This has been a long, long time coming. It’s our best of series. So think of it. If we were musicians, this would be, I don’t know, greatest hits, but we’re, we’re not, it’s our best of series. For all of the books we published over 40 years.
And we curated some of the top authors in that collection and we put them all together and they were, they were game enough to want to read their chapters and participate in the creative and construction process. So that’s what we’re here celebrating today. So I brought one of the authors. Back onto the show.
Brad has been a guest multiple times. So Brad Weber, for those that you do not know him, he’s a president and CEO over at inspiring apps, Brad. I know that’s the longest intro you’ve ever, I’m not usually that long, but Hey, welcome back, man. It’s good to see your face. It’s great to be back. So, so Brad We’re going to get into, of course, your content in the book, the audio book.
I’m curious to hear what, like how the recording process was for you. Cause that’s always interesting. But before we do all that you and our guests in our, in our audience, all know we start this episode with what we call our mission matters minute. So Brad at Mission Matters, , our aim is to amplify stories and to get them out there for business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives.
So that’s what we do. Brad, what mission matters to you? I’m passionate about helping brands connect with their customers by designing and building digital products. Those customers love. Yeah. Love it. Well, great to have you back on. And just to, just to jump right in here celebrating recording the audio book.
I know one of the engineers that, that worked on the book, he’s actually in the, doing the controls in the background. So it’s okay. Jack, close your ears, Brad, what was it like recording your audio, your portion of the audio book? It was fantastic. And actually I’ll go back to your opener, inviting others who want to.
Hmm. Be a guest on your show to endorse you and say that Adam, you and your team have been totally professional and, and great to work with through the book and the audio book process. So, ah, I can’t say enough good things. It was really nice to connect with some other authors along the way as well.
Yeah. But it was great and honestly, the audio book was, was easier to. To record, produce them than I expected. Yeah. Isn’t it fun to finally like hear it and like the end product, and then you get to hear all the voices the first time I listened to it and for everybody that’s watching this, just so you know, so the audio book is it’s made up of about 15 different chapters and each one.
Has the author is reading their own stories. So think about it as every, every chapter you listen to, you get to hear from the author with the exception of one that I, that I recorded for them. But other than that, all of the authors read their story. So to me, it’s kind of like this surreal experience because of course I’ve interviewed you and I’ve talked to all of the authors before, but it’s like, almost like a collection of friends.
Cause I know everybody and I’ve obviously worked with everybody. What was it like for you? Like going through and hearing. All of the different stories and hearing it from their voice. Yeah, it was nice for that same reason. I, I have not had the pleasure of speaking with everyone that I co authored with.
So it was fun to hear their, their passion in telling their stories as well. It’s different to me. It was different. I was like, just as a work and a creative work, it was like, normally one person reads the whole book or this or that, or maybe even six. sections, but to see like each one be something different and to hear their passion for what they, you know, what, what their particular story was.
I thought it was, it’s unique, a unique work in the marketplace. And I hope that that many, many people go out and grab it because I think it’s worth listening to. That’s why we made it. So let’s I want to maybe take a couple of steps back for maybe some of our, our new listeners here, Brad, that maybe haven’t caught some of our previous work together.
So maybe just. Talk a little bit more about inspiring apps, what you do and kind of how you got started there just to, to, to set the tone before we get into some of the content that you submitted. Sure. Yeah. By way of background inspiring apps creates digital products for companies. We, we develop custom digital products for enterprises and funded startups across a really wide variety of industries.
Lately that has been a heavy emphasis in financial services and medical, but lots of innovation happening really across the market. It’s been really fun for us to, to work with you talk about starting it. So I had my start after my master’s program, a large. Consulting firm, one of the global, you know, what they called the big six at the time.
I don’t know how many left now. And while I learned things for sure, I realized most importantly that that was not the environment for me to thrive in. And I ventured out on my own after a few years in that environment and had a number of experiences starting my own thing, developing software and for small businesses.
Well, I tried to build up a client base, not having quite enough clients, taking a job for a little while, going back to trying to build my own business. Entrepreneurial journey. You gotta love it. A series of those until I found something that worked and did so independently for about a dozen years before I found it.
Inspiring apps. And now we’re in our 17th year and have built an all us based team that designs, develops, tests, a wide variety of products. As I mentioned, what I love to get a work in a pay it forward question when I can. And I think I got my opening here, Brad. What, what, what, what kept you like strong during those, those, those times when it’s going up and down, like what, what kept you moving forward?
Oh, my goodness. It was easier in some respects when I was on my own, there were just fewer moving parts and honestly, I think that having that success on my own is what really helped me once I started to grow a team. As, as things got challenging, I needed to, to hear my inner voice saying, you’ve done this before, you know, you know how to push this forward, you know, how to succeed and that along with having a great team to, to support me through this is really bled to the bone.
The success that we’ve enjoyed. So going a little bit further into what you’re doing right now, I know since we last spoke, I mean, you’re, you’re my guy when it comes to this apps, anything like this, just period. Like I I’m like, okay, Brad, like, what should I be thinking about? I’m hearing all this noise.
All I’m hearing right now is AI, AI, AI. What have you been, what, what kind of conversations have you been having since we last spoke? It is part of almost every. Project conversation that we’re having now for sure, and having done this for as long as I have, it reminds me of some other trends that I’m sure your viewers will be familiar with.
But there was a time in my business past where. Everybody needed a website and that was the craze. And then when the iPhone, you got to pause there for a second. Like that’s for some of our younger audience, they’re going to be like, that was the craze we got to at least laugh at this. And yes, I was around for that craze too, or a.
com anything that had. com on it was going to be an amazing investment. Go ahead, please. I just had to pause for that one so that our younger listeners will get it. Yes, that was a craze. You need a website. Yes. I, I appreciate you calling that out, Adam. I’m, I’m sure there are a number of people who just decided to tune out the old guy
Oh, no, I was there too. They better not tune out. Go. But after that, and it was 2007 when the, the iPhone was introduced. Mm. There, there was another. Oh, that was a great craze. I, I didn’t, I wasn’t, I was, I think I was too busy working at that point to understand what was going on. Like actually working. I just graduated college.
So I was busy doing that to have the time to, but that was a great craze. I’m like, what are all these lines about? What’s all this other stuff going on? What sold out phone? Who cares? That was amazing. Yeah. So during that time and. You know, it’s, it’s tempered somewhat, but there were definitely years in there where every business felt like they needed an app, they needed a mobile app to be relevant, just like the, the web before.
And I see some commonality with the AI craze that’s happening now. It’s. Much like the introduction of the, the iPhone and the Android platform. It it’s going to impact our lives in really meaningful ways. But what I recommend to businesses who are getting caught up in the frenzy. Is to really focus as you do for all things like this on what problem is it that you’re trying to solve?
What what is the challenge specifically? And then we have loads of tools in our toolbox. AI is is a big one right now It’s kind of a sledgehammer at the moment, but There are a lot of tools in the toolbox to solve a variety of business problems with a digital product, and that’s just one way that, that we can help either save people time you know, improve the quality of whatever it is that they’re producing, maybe offer suggestions or slice and dice data in in ways that they haven’t considered before.
Those are all some of the benefits of AI. But, you know, It really needs to be serving a specific purpose. And don’t just jump on the AI bandwagon because you see your competitors doing it and feel like you have to do something. What, what excites you about AI right now? Like you mentioned it having the ability to help us or to progress us.
Like, like what, what excites you about it right now? Could be technology, could be how it’s helping business. I mean, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Like it could be something for just for fun. I don’t know. What excites you about AI right now? It’s, it is. Phenomenal and honestly amazing even as somebody like me who’s been in the industry for so long to see how rapidly It’s advancing.
It seems like not long ago, we were kind of wowed by the fact that you could point your camera at a piece of fruit and it would know the difference between an apple and a banana. Like, Ooh, that’s great. And now it’s, it’s writing entire articles for us. It is categorizing data in unique ways. As I mentioned before it’s, it’s pretty impressive.
And what’s happening with, with mixed media now with photos and videos coming into the mix as well. It’s not just. working with text, but being able to generate original quote unquote derived original video content or photo content from from prompts that we give it is pretty cool. It’s fun to think about.
How we might apply that for, for business purposes. And to me, it’s interesting to see how, how fast it’s moving. Like even how, like, you know, some of the original written content, I don’t even have to get into the video. Cause that’s moving to the, like all of it, generative, anything like it’s just moving so fast and getting so much better.
It, it, it changes my concept of five year planning. I feel like anybody that’s in a creative field that, I mean, in the past, like, how do you even build a studio and plan for your studio in terms of five years now, I don’t feel like you can go more than two because by the time, even in investments in large amounts of equipment or things, I’ll give you an example.
And this might be a bad one is they say that AI is not a. Replacing jobs or this or that. Well, I can tell you one very specific one where I’m like, Oh, wait a minute. And that is one of these conferences that we covered recently. And this person still works for us. So I’m not saying it’s replaced their job, by the way.
I’m not saying that, but it did replace the need for an entire person at a conference for us when we’re shooting. Why? Cause I bought last minute, the person couldn’t come and I bought an AI camera. And it was phenomenal. And I was like, wow, like this is like, I mean, it did exactly what we needed it to do.
Put it that way for the size of production and other things. So that was the first one that directly I would say affected mission matters, our business in terms of like production. Outwardly where it was an actual person, everything else we’ve added before, whether it’s like, you know, increasing the quality of a video, increasing the quality, that’s all just been adding a layer.
Nothing at, until that moment, was there like, it was more like a fork in the road versus adding a layer of improvement. And I was like, wow, how does somebody even plan for five years now? Yeah, I think that’s a great point. I agree with you there. There’s a lot of talk about this. Not taking jobs, not replacing people.
There will absolutely be jobs that go away as a result of this, even if it means that we’re making the existing team more productive. And don’t need to hire somebody. It might not be that someone gets fired because AI took their job. And that’s been our experience just to throw that out there. Like not, not trying to be politically correct, but I’m just letting people know that’s been our experience is that now we’re able to do more with, I won’t say less, but But with higher skilled individuals that have been trained on better tools, what were every employer wants to enable individuals in there and their employee to feel, you know, needed, wanted invested in when it comes to training and otherwise, so it’s a greater work environment, in my opinion.
Go ahead. I just wanted to throw that out there to clarify just in case somebody thought no, nobody lost their job. It’s okay. Totally, totally agree. And regarding the speed chat, GBT open AI had been doing their work for years behind the scenes. It really came into its own last spring. I got an early spring and I was fortunate to attend a Microsoft event in New York where they were demoing the capabilities at the time.
And it was. It was impressive. Even, even then there was some things that got my attention and I was kind of excited about it. In November, I got an update on where things had gotten just in six months. And again, was, was shocked at the progress that was made. And then for, for those people who follow this in the industry, Google have their developer conference this week and announce things again.
We’re now like six months after that. And some of the things that they’re adding to their platform, I wouldn’t have imagined a year ago, sitting in that Microsoft office. Impossible now. So it, it’s an impressive pace of innovation. That’s pretty cool. Yeah, I think it’s fun. I think it’s a fun space. I think it’s a, I tell people, I just think they should just, just get involved, like get involved, understand, know, especially for a bit, I mean, two different sides of this in your personal life, whatever, do what you want, but in your business life, like you can, I’ll give you one that you may or may not Know about Brad.
And this changed our complete business. Like literally not, I shouldn’t say it wasn’t a big part of our business, but we had Amazon released a update to their publishing platform and no, I don’t, I’m not an affiliate. I don’t get paid for this. Anybody that’s listening, but they essentially did it to where you can now use an AI voice integrated in their platform, though there are plenty of them to record audio books now.
So it’s like, wow. Like, so we, we did one of our books, not a, not one of my books that I wrote. So driven I, I was considering, okay, am I going to read this? Am I going to go in studio? Am I do all this? I get an email to be a part of their beta. I clicked the button and I swear it was within 10 minutes.
There was an audio book already published for that book. AI voice. That was pretty dang good. Like I was like, it’s business content. I’m not an actor. I don’t know how much, I don’t, I don’t know, like all self like assessment and like, I don’t know, the AI might’ve read it better than me, Brad. I’m not that good at that.
So like, and they, so now you think about that entire industry. If you were a voiceover actor, if you were like, at least for audio books, I’m talking about specifically for audio books like that, a studio, like anything else, if you were doing 20 audio books, 50 audio books a year in your studio, people were coming in recording, whatever, whatever.
Now, who knows? Maybe that’s a quarter of that or whatever the amount is, but some people are definitely going to choose the alternative to just, you know, click a button and be done with it in five minutes versus whatever. Going in studio and doing the other side of it. So I’m like, I’m just amazed at how quickly everything is shifting.
And I can’t believe it’s already only been a year with this whole chat GPT thing. I feel like it’s been in my life for a decade. I feel like it’s hard to imagine what next year will hold. Well, I’m gonna bring you back and I’m like, Brad, what else should I be thinking about? I want to, I want to jump around a bit here.
I want to go a little bit further into the book. Everybody, I definitely want you to pick up a copy for sure. The audio book is live and out there so you can hear Brad actually reading his chapter and reading his work. But the title of your, your section was meet, meet business challenges and build an inspiring business.
And you go through. Things on your journey and kind of lay those out for people. I think it’s a great entrepreneurial story. And I think you also, I like about it too, is you don’t sugarcoat it. Like it’s not all, it’s not all fun and games. Right. Why did, so why did you choose this topic? Like a lot, a lot of different things you could have written about a lot of different angles.
Like, why’d you choose to present this? Yeah. I think your, your last comment about it. Not all being a bed of roses, so to speak, it was important to me. I learn from the mistakes and trials of others. I don’t, sometimes it’s easier to hear those lessons and apply them and, and avoid those, those problems in your own life than it is to hear someone’s perfect path and, and think about how you’re going to, you’re going to stick to that because it’s not going to happen.
They’re, they’re going to be. Challenges, they’re going to be things that throw you off your, your journey, your intended route. And I think it’s valuable for me to hear how other people have dealt with adversity. And so I wanted to share some of what I walked through in my process. And hopefully that’ll be helpful.
That will benefit someone else in a similar way. So a lot of different things you wrote about. So growing a company fraught with risk, cultivating a winning culture requires an employee based team, a flat organizational structure will only take you so far. So a lot of different nuggets you gave in your journey.
The one that I want to talk about today, and the one that I want to pick out though, is create. Cool stuff for clients or build a real business. Talk to me about that, Brad. Yeah. So this, this evolves a little bit. If we go back to the story of my journey that I shared where I was working independently and, and what I enjoyed was.
Was making cool stuff and it was fun to demo not only for the client that I was working with at the time, but share with friends and others that helped generate more business. And as I founded inspiring apps, I carried those habits and kind of those practices along with me and in the new business. And as I was trying to grow a team that worked for a while, but it wasn’t a sustainable business strategy.
And so the, the message in that section that you’re referring to is that there really are valuable business lessons to be taken. Not just from other technology companies, but across industry, where it is extremely valuable to have a leadership team, for instance, to support me and for them to focus on parts of the business that are blind spots for me, or not necessarily my strengths.
And this touches a bit on another section that you had talked about growing the organization, but having team leads to be a point person for our technology teams, our developers specifically who are really thinking about best practices and their area of focus. Those are things that are critical to building something that’s sustainable longer term.
We, we still build cool things. That’s just not the business strategy. Yeah. And, and what’s, I’ll tell you, this is such a I feel all business owners kind of make these trade offs. They just don’t word it that well, like build cool things. Like everybody wants to serve their company or their, their clients, their everything, and now with AI, I mean, this is a funny part is I didn’t, I didn’t even mean to tie that into the, to the book, but, but when you think about like all the new toys that are out there for people to start, you know, exploring with and doing, and even if it is a new technology or a new thing, I like your process of Thinking, okay, well, who’s going to lead that project?
Right? Like, are you just going to, just because you were able to get a new piece of software, a new thing, or otherwise, how are you going to implement that? Like, what’s going to be the tracking? Does it make sense for your business? Does it add to whatever the the objective was that you thought it was going to do, or, or is it just going to be cool?
I use it and should it be, I’ll use one example that we come across pretty often. Speaking to AI, it’s like, Oh, now, now everybody can spend 30 bucks and make a million pieces of content constantly and put it out there with the click of a button, obviously I’m exaggerating, but not. Quite. So, so now for a business to think about, okay, like, does that actually solve your branding presence or your presence in the marketplace, assuming that’s what you’re going after?
Or does that actually help your reach or you actually taking away from your brand by putting out a bunch of things that weren’t really well thought out. And now it’s going to be really hard to clean those up. So it’s this constant, I feel, trade off of what you’re doing like publicly, obviously, and what you’re doing to build.
But then also what you’re doing internally, how you’re designing those processes in the case of what you talk about, as you mentioned again, in one of the previous site is like the organizational structure and like what’s next with that and how that https: otter. ai I’m, I’m a fan of the way you laid this out because it really does give a it does give an overview and it gives some really good milestones and touch points, if you will, for people to kind of reassess after you read it, or in this case, listen to it in the audio book and go back and say, huh, Do I need to revisit that in my organization or in my situation?
So there’s a lot of, I know there’s a lot of different takeaways and nuggets here, but if you had to narrow it down to one what, what do you hope your readers will walk away with from, from, from this experience and from, and from reading your work? What do you hope they’ll walk away with? There’s a lot in there, as you had mentioned.
I think we’ve touched on some of them. I’ll bring up a new topic that I think is. Is really been extremely valuable for me is the importance of company culture and how for us I, I tried to build a team of contractors in the early days and that it, it is challenging for many reasons, but one of the areas where it’s particularly challenging is to establish a company culture, because if you’ve got contractors who are coming and going pretty frequently over time, there, there’s nothing to really, there’s not a common thread that’s running through your projects, running through the people that, that stay and having employees is.
On our team now exclusively has really made a huge difference for us. And we just celebrated somebody’s 14th year Wow. Inspiring apps this week. And we’ve got another 14 year Wow. And three coming up next month. Congratulations. That’s amazing. That’s, yeah. There, there are a lot of people who’ve been with us for five, 10 years or more.
Wow. And I, I think it’s a differentiator for us. Not only is it really a pleasure to work with people that you get to know over that period of time, but there’s so much institutional knowledge that, that stays in the company from project to project that benefits our clients as well, it’s been incredibly valuable.
Wow. It’s amazing. Well, well, Brad really want to thank you again for participating in this most recent release of our best of series volume one of mission matters. So really excited about it for everybody that’s watching. We’re going to put some links in the show notes that you can click on the links and just head right on over and pick up a copy.
But Brad, if somebody wants to connect with you, You and your team. And they want to talk more about what you’re up to over at inspiring apps. How do they do that? Our website, certainly inspiringapps. com and we’re fairly active on LinkedIn as well, and you can find us there. It’s inspiring apps.
Perfect. And for everybody watching, we’ll, we’ll also put those links in the show notes so that you can head right on over to inspiring apps and speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters, check it out. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new thought leaders, new episodes.
If that’s something that you’re interested in, hit that subscribe button. We welcome you to, so you don’t miss any of the upcoming thought leaders and experts. And Brad, thank you again so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thanks Adam.