Ben Johnson
countdown last time. Yay! And this is why I don’t use Chrome.

Sam Olmsted
Oh! Wow. Huge.

Meara McNitt
We got it!

Sam Olmsted
OK, perfect. Let’s do it. So we are recording. I felt like my intro before wasn’t that great anyway, so I’m happy to restart it. So I’ll say again, I’ll say everyone do their thing. All right. All right, so I’m going to say thanks for joining us, and then tell me about it. Cool. Well, thanks for joining us. Ben, how are you?

Meara McNitt
Jordan!

Meara McNitt
Yeah, from the top.

Ben Johnson
My intro wasn’t that great.

Ben Johnson
Sorry, let me just, let me finish two of my ice.

Ben Johnson
Alright.

Ben Johnson
Oh, doing great. The weather in Louisiana right now is excellent.

Sam Olmsted
October in Louisiana is my favorite time of the year. All right, well, again, thanks for having you on the podcast here. Thanks for being here. Could you tell us about… I’m just going to restart that whole thing. We just started. I might just… I’m just going to restart. We just started. I might as well just restart the whole thing. Okay. All right. I appreciate that.

Meara McNitt
Thanks for having being on the podcast.

Ben Johnson
Thanks for having us on your podcast, Ben.

Meara McNitt
Go again. Round the top.

Ben Johnson
I’m gonna come up with a different thing to say. Yeah, all right.

Sam Olmsted
Okay. Well, thanks for joining us, Ben. How are you?

Ben Johnson
I’m doing great other than the fact that my daughters are kicking my butt in Fortnite right now. But I’m doing well.

Sam Olmsted
All right, well, let’s get started. Can you tell us a little bit about Techneaux and what your company is?

Ben Johnson
Sure, our elevator pitch is we do boring computer stuff. It’s not boring to us, it’s boring to most of our customers. But at the foundation of what we do, it’s in our name, we’re a technology services group. So we help our customers with their technology and where we found sort of our niche and where we play best is helping our customers in their data journey.

from the creation of their data, all businesses, they have something they do to make money. And there’s processes or drilling for oil, right? There’s devices and things that are out there. And you want to understand what your business is doing and help that information on the back end in the enterprise and merge that data together to make better business decisions. And so we help along that entire data journey. We will go out and put devices out into the field or on equipment or…

create software for their people to collect the data that they’re doing. And once we have that data, we’ll then transmit it over networks. We create networks for our customers, WANs, LANs, we work with satellites and cells and fiber optics networks to get that data into a location where we centralize all that data in data lakes, data warehouses. And this is, this is big data for our customers. It can be millions of points that are getting recorded at

kind of sub-second speeds or even data that’s just getting tracked once a day type thing. But we gather all that data in one place and then we help our customers turn it into information. We give it context, we normalize that data. And then we help them move that data from their operations into their IT space, into their enterprise, where we can merge that data with accounting information, financials, compliance, engineering, anything that they’re really doing in the back office.

that helps their business run better. We get all that together, we put a nice cybersecurity wrapper around it, and so that’s the foundation of what we do without getting too much into the details and maybe making your eyes glaze over. So I’ll stop there.

Meara McNitt
I can’t believe that was the gloss over. I feel like I already got so much information.

Sam Olmsted
Hehehe

Ben Johnson
That’s the best I can do.

Meara McNitt
Oh my gosh. All right. Well, so I understand that Techneaux was either founded with like a different purpose or has a different model. Can you tell us about what that is?

Ben Johnson
Hmm. Yeah.

Yes, so I always wanted to own a business since I was young. Said after seven years being out of college, I would start my own company and it was really based on what I saw from my family. All of my family owned businesses. My grandparents on both sides of my family. There was a grocery store. There was a veterinarian clinic.

My dad owned his own company. My mom is kind of a serial entrepreneur before they even knew what entrepreneurs were, and I think it was more around her ADHD, but we’ll call her an entrepreneur. She had several businesses. And one thing that always stuck out with me was just getting to see the people that they affected, kind of the lives and the community that was built around those. And I didn’t realize business could affect people’s lives like that. And so, was

working with my dad at a company and we decided, hey, it was actually over martinis at a Christmas family event. And we said, you know, we really want to start a company that’s focused on helping people. And that’s actually in our mission statement. Our mission statement is three sentences and half the people hate it. Other people think it’s a good mission, but it’s, we help customers succeed. We help each other succeed. And then we help Techneaux succeed.

And it’s really kind of in that order. We focus a lot as a service company on our people and our customers. And then at the end of the day, Techneaux hopefully benefits from that as well. But the real seed of the idea for Techneaux was around becoming a perpetual business based on distributed capitalism. And that came really from my dad was the one that originated the base concept of what we’re going with.

Ben Johnson
And it happened from his previous business when he had to exit after seven or nine years of owning the company. He was really upset with the way that the sale went and what happened afterwards. Basically the commitments he had made to his customers and his people, it kind of crumbled. It was during the dot-com boom. So not many businesses were surviving after that. But he took it really personally and wanted to have this idea for a new model, which was

To create a sustainable business where there’s an exit strategy already in place, the owners grow wealth and so you’re not dictated by having to work 30 years, realize, oh, I haven’t made me money. I need to go and sell to someone. And when you sell to someone, that someone’s probably not in line with your, maybe your morals, your values, your mission statement. They’re buying you for a customer list. They’re buying you for your expertise.

And so we have a model that allows us to continue to work without having to sell out, without having to get private equity or venture capitalists. Because when you do that, you now have a moral and an ethical responsibility to those shareholders, right? To do what’s best for them. And what is best for them? They’re looking to make money, right? They want to return on that investment. They’re not so much concerned about the operations of your business. And if you’re doing things the right way.

Meara McNitt
More money. Yeah.

Ben Johnson
They’re worried about that Q1, Q3, P&L and what your balance statement looks like. So, and then also, so that’s from the financial side of it for the owners, but then it’s for the people and the customers as well, right? Again, you make those commitments. It’s not just business. I hate that phrase, oh, it’s just business, you know? It’s not, I mean, there’s a lot of relationships around business.

And when you’ve made those commitments, you have to take that seriously and to your people to help them grow and to your customers that you’re going to do what’s best for them. So.

Sam Olmsted
Yeah.

Sam Olmsted
So what is a perpetual business model? What is this perpetual model that you’ve built that is different than other companies that allows you to grow without selling out? And how does that actually work from your side as the owner?

Ben Johnson
Okay, so it’s still a work in progress. Let me say that. But we have proven some of it. So the idea behind it is that Techneaux remains alive and doesn’t have to be sold, thereby being perpetual. But you can only be perpetual if…

there’s people that are coming up and leading the business after you leave, right? I’m going to want to exit it sometime. I have three daughters. I’d love to go spend some more time with them and hopefully my grandchildren, whenever I, if I have those. And so, you know, I’m not going to be around for Techneaux all the time. And so if, if the business is solely successful because of me, then it crumbles afterwards. So to be perpetual, you have to be focused on growing those leaders and those new owners that are going to come in. So

Techneaux is really an umbrella company if you think about it. And it maybe isn’t as unique as we’d like to think it is. It may kind of be like a CPA firm where there’s partners and things like that. But what Techneaux does is we have a shared services group that handles the accounting, the HR, the payroll, the compliance, the legal, so that our business units underneath Techneaux can focus on the two things that we know are most important for a business. It’s your people and your customers.

And most of us as business owners, we got into business because we were really good at what we did, not because we’re good at business. I don’t know that I’m a great business person, but I’m a pretty good computer engineer. And so if we can allow those people to focus on what they do best, then those businesses really thrive and we see that. And so what happens is I’ve been growing. Owners within the company, we, we started an IT group, the business services that.

Sam Olmsted
Right.

Ben Johnson
to at first to diversify, but we had two guys that really put in some sweat equity and work. And so now they own business services. They’re buying out Michael and I from our share. Michael is my business partner, the original founder. But they now own business services. And with obviously guidance and help from us, and there’s a Techneaux ecosystem. But then also I started our enterprise services group and it was just me.

brought up a guy, he earned in some sweat equity, earned, and now he’s buying out a portion of my ownership so that he can be majority owner and I can go and focus on Techneaux. So Techneaux started in a garage, two people, and now we have two owners and now we have seven owners at Techneaux. And so that’s the way that we want to make it perpetual. And it’s the people that have grown within the business so that our customers are familiar with those people. Our team members are familiar with those people.

familiar with them as leaders and there’s no real big divide when I exit, when I leave. And I’ve been growing wealth the whole time. I didn’t leverage debt. I made sure and all of the business owners are doing this, we’ve made sure that we’re profitable. We’re not just, it’s not speculation and growth and oh well, you got to do some stuff to get the EBITDA up but you know, don’t worry about profit, leverage debt, do those things.

I’m worried about profit. We need to keep this business paid and I need to grow wealth right now so that I don’t have to in 30 years sell the mat at some insane markup. That doesn’t make any sense but it’s just because I haven’t been good with money and I need to make some money to get out of it. So that’s sort of the perpetual thing.

Meara McNitt
So if I could summarize it and try to, I want to make sure that I understand what you’re saying. So basically what you get to do is you get to hire people who you feel match the values and the work ethic and the goals of Techneaux. And then they come in, they put in the work, you recognize that in them, you might help them develop into the leaders, then they take on a higher role. They’re going to get equity, they’re going to take ownership of a portion. So that way when you’re ready to go, they can step in and you make sure that Techneaux is still being run.

by the people that are Techneaux, rather than some stranger who’s gonna manipulate it.

Ben Johnson
Yes, yes. And we may have external owners come in. We haven’t ruled that out. It hasn’t happened that way yet. You know, the growth has been very organic in a sense, but that’s also part of when we talk about we want to keep the commitment to our people and provide the most opportunities as possible in other corporations. I’ve been a part of there’s a ladder, right? There’s a corporate ladder. We don’t have titles at Techmo. We have roles. We don’t have titles, though. And I want to stay away from that. The Peter principle where you get, you know,

elevated to your highest level of incompetence. We allow people to try different things that includes the technical track, but then also the business track. You know, I’ve seen it other companies where they lost their best and their brightest because they didn’t wanna go and start their own company. And the CEO, CFO says, oh, we can’t do that. You can’t make as much money as your boss, but why not? You know, and so, and then those people leave and you’ve got this huge hole in the company where your best people left. And why? Because you said there was no room for them there. So,

Sam Olmsted
Right.

Meara McNitt
Yeah.

Ben Johnson
We try to make room for those people and at the same time it helps benefit that perpetual nature.

Sam Olmsted
So it is kind of like a law firm or a CPA firm where you’ve got different partners and owners. And so when you elevate someone to that ownership level, do you know that going in when you hire them? You say, this is someone I think who’s going to be on that management, that business side track. Or do you hire people just because they’re good and they’re smart and they’re hardworking, and then you figure out where they want to go after you’ve worked with them for a few years?

Ben Johnson
Yeah, I think it’s probably more the second thing, you know, those that typically I’ve found the ones that say, Oh, I want to be a leader. I want to be an owner. Probably not the people that you want to be owners or leaders. They don’t realize that those things are earned. They’re not just given, you know, it really is. And it’s so intangible. You know, I can interview very well for.

Sam Olmsted
haha

Sam Olmsted
Right. And it’s a separate skill set, honestly.

Sam Olmsted
Mm-hmm.

Ben Johnson
You know, do you have the coding skills? Can you use Excel? Do you have no databases? But when it comes to, Hey, are you a good person? Do you, do you, do you lead from the front or the back or, you know, all those different things? And, and so, um, we talk a lot about just, just get the right people on the bus. We’ll figure out. We don’t have a bus driver necessarily, but we’ll figure out where we’re going once we get the right people on the bus. So that’s, that’s really how it’s been. And those people tend to gravitate towards it.

Meara McNitt
So the other buzzword that we’ve had about Techneaux is distributed capitalism. What? What is that?

Ben Johnson
Yeah. All right. So our concept of that, I mean, love capitalism. Yay. Raw. But I think it’s been a little distorted in the way that the business world uses it these days. And we’re real big on compensating people for the value that they bring. And

you know, everyone here works to make profit for the company. So everyone here, in my opinion, should share in that profit. Um, and I know we’ve all seen these articles, Reddit, wherever of, Oh, this CEO is making 350 times the average, um, team members salary. And that just is mind boggling to me. It’s just, I, how, how have you become so distorted as a human being to feel that you’re worth?

300 times another person’s value. I just don’t get it. So I’ll never I’ll never make 300 times team members and that’s built into our model because I was talking about how we split out business services and we have two new owners of business services Well that P&L that’s theirs. That is theirs to own they They own 95% of the profit from that company. I don’t see any of it anymore. You know, there’s

There’s expenses to Techneaux that they cover as a group, right? We all pitch in to help our shared services group, uh, because they’re not a, they’re a cost center and they’re not a, they’re not a revenue center. Excuse me. Um, and I don’t feel I should make money off of that business anymore. Just because I started Techneaux, I’m not pro I’m providing some value to them as, as CEO, as founder and giving them guidance, but

that’s part of them buying me out, right? And they buy me out over a period of five years. And then I’m out of that. I’m no longer part of it. And I shouldn’t be, I don’t feel that I should be. And then the other piece of that is every single group is required to profit share because we want people to experience profit and loss. Well.

Ben Johnson
They don’t experience the loss. That’s really just only owners, but they do experience the profits. Um, and, and that’s why we don’t call it any of your bonus. It’s not a bonus. I’m not giving this to you out of the kindness of my heart. You worked hard. You made us some money. We’re profitable. And most businesses we like our business unit, for instance, it’s 33% of our bottom line goes back to team members. 33% gets reinvested in, uh, my BU and then 33% goes to the owners. Matt.

Sam Olmsted
Yeah.

Meara McNitt
Hahaha!

Ben Johnson
And so, and again, that is a requirement of Techneaux. So those two things built into where, hey, as founders, Michael and I aren’t going to forever make money off of these other business units that we’re not involved in. And then also, I didn’t like Esop’s the way that they were handled. I thought it was a little kludgy. So we go by a profit sharing model. We were very transparent. We show everyone what we make. We open up the books. They can dig around to their heart’s content.

But that profit goes back to the people that really worked to earn it. So that’s what we talk about with distributed capitalism. Sorry, no worries. You’re good.

Meara McNitt
Are you there?

So I didn’t mean to interrupt. But are there any business leaders who you see out there, and you’re like, yeah, that’s the moral way to do it, or that’s how I want to do it?

Ben Johnson
Yikes. I honestly am so head down in what I’m doing that I haven’t. There’s some really cool stuff going on in Spain where they have some business co-ops that is a similar model to Tecno that’s been around longer than Tecno. I didn’t even know about them. Someone had passed me that information, but it was a lot around these smaller businesses.

Sam Olmsted
Hehehehe

Ben Johnson
And again, compensating the people that do the work and not getting into this whole atmosphere, the Silicon Valley, whatever you want to call it, of people not really caring about the technology. They’re caring about the bottom line. They don’t care about the people. They’re really just, hey, how do I look good? How do I get that hockey stick ebony to sell to the next one and ramp up? And who cares if this stuff actually works? If I marketed it well, then someone’s going to buy it. But…

Yeah, I don’t know that there’s anyone I would say that I’m modeling after. I would love it. I’d love to start bouncing these ideas off of someone. So if y’all find someone that has the same ideas, let me know. I’d love to chat with them.

Sam Olmsted
I just want to say, you know, this is really interesting for me. I think it’s really exciting that basically you built a business that you can get out of. That’s first of all, something that not many people think of. How do I get out of this without destroying the clients, the customers, the company that I built or the community that you’re working to build for decades or whatever that may be. And then also this perpetual business model, distributed capitalism. I think it probably makes your employees work harder because they’re trying to get their groups.

to do higher profits within those different groups within the company. Right? I mean, you said that Techneaux is an umbrella company. It’s basically something that has individual working groups, correct? So do you feel like your teams are working harder toward that profit and that profit sharing? Or how do you feel that that’s affected the overall morale of the company?

Ben Johnson
Correct.

Ben Johnson
Yeah, so idealistically, I want to say everybody should love this. It’s great. We’re giving back money. You’re making it. You know, it’s you should be bought in 100 percent, right? And it sounds great in interviews and people are so excited when they get here to work. And for the most part, it is that it’s people get it. They understand we’re working together.

Sam Olmsted
Right. I’m on board, yeah.

Meara McNitt
Yeah.

Ben Johnson
you know, to benefit the greater good. They also aren’t demotivated by the fact that, oh, well that business unit didn’t do good this year, that means my profits are gonna be affected. Well, no, you still worked hard, you made money, you’re getting money, just because that shop may have lost, you’re not going to. And so there is a sense of pride and work ethic that they know that they’re going to be compensated for what they’ve done. There are complications in that though, you know, as you.

Um, it can lead to, because, because again, my last focus, the least thing I wanted to focus on was money, right? The profit. That’s why we’re not private investors at venture capitalists, but then it’s almost a 180 where some people can get too focused on the money. And they’re like, I have to do it this way because I got to make more money. It’s like, Oh no, we’ve created what we didn’t want. You know, it’s, it’s kind of creating exactly what we didn’t want. Um, but as with any.

Sam Olmsted
Right, instead of outside people focused, hyper focused on the money. It’s, it’s, it’s inside the house. Yeah. Okay.

Ben Johnson
It’s internally generated now. Yeah, yeah. But as with anything, you know, we try to be very transparent and communicate with people and when we hear those things, we try to talk through it and help them understand, hey, that’s not the right mindset to have, you know. But it’s not, it is definitely something we found that is not inherent to a person’s thoughts as to how business should work. You know, they’re just, it almost seems like a foreign concept.

to them and so it’s tough for them to kind of buy in and understand and so it takes a few years of them being here seeing it work and really that’s what reinforces the model with them where they say, okay, I think I get it now. I think we’re not focused on the money but we are making money and so I’m happy to be here.

Meara McNitt
I feel like on the internet right now, there’s this whole thing with quiet quitting where people, they just check out of their jobs and then eventually they leave. I feel like this has got to kind of prevent that because a lot of time people are like, I’m being overworked and I’m not going to get paid any better. This is my job. This is my title. I’m maxed out. I feel like since people get the money that they’re responsible for, it’s got to be motivating.

Ben Johnson
Right.

Ben Johnson
Absolutely, that’s a that’s a key piece to it another piece to that I think is goes into our mission statement and The way that we’re focused on helping people I hear this a lot from other the quiet quitting thing is one of them But then I also hear from other business owners like I don’t know those damn Millennials They don’t want to work, you know, and it’s like yeah, okay. Well, maybe your culture doesn’t incentivize them to do that and so

We compensate them not only financially, like we’ve been talking about, but one thing I’ve found with younger generations is they have a great sense of a work-life balance, but also the great asset they have, which is time. Time is something that we have a limited amount of. We can’t make any more of it.

it’s very important in a job that they understand that they’re doing something that’s valuable and useful and worth their time. They’re spending their time away from loved ones, friends, families, hobbies, all that stuff, right? And so, as a business, we find that it’s important for us to show them that there is value in what we’re doing. And that’s why we highlight how we help people and other things that we do. I would probably go way down a rabbit hole on this, but…

That’s a way that Techneaux can compensate them as well is we give them true job security is and job security is not if Techneaux is going to be around forever. It’s if they’ve built a resume that they’re happy with that they can go take to any company and say, Hey, that job posting you had, I want that job. You’re going to pay me this amount and they get it. That is real job security. Right. And so they’re coming into work knowing and that’s why we don’t have any titles. We want people to try things. We want them to fail. We want them to do different things and build that resume in the way that they want.

another valuable thing where they don’t feel that they’re just at a desk working 40 hours a week for no reason. And so that coupled, I think, is kind of that tripod for how we keep people excited and happy and challenged.

Sam Olmsted
Ben, can I ask you a quick question? So my first marketing job that I ever had, they did not give me a title. Nobody had titles at this company. And I was 22 and right out of college and I was frustrated by it because I wanted a title. I wanted something that defined the work I was doing something. I knew that wasn’t gonna be my job forever. So I wanted something that I could take to the next job and say, this is what I did. And this is what my work was titled.

Ben Johnson
Mm-hmm.

Sam Olmsted
So how does your employees feel about that, especially newer employees who maybe aren’t used to that? How do they feel about the lack of titles and does that bother anyone?

Ben Johnson
It definitely has some disadvantages and some challenges along with it. But the way that we overcome them is, is it starts in the interview process. Um, we actually, our interviews. I mean, it’s so hard to find people these days. The interviews have really flipped around towards, you know, you’re selling the company to them as even more so than they’re selling themselves to you. Uh, but it starts in that process where half of the interview is technical, but the other half is cultural. And one thing that we bring up is the fact that we don’t have.

titles and because it does take a certain type of person to work here and there’s disadvantages to it or perceived disadvantages, I think, that people have to work through in their minds in that if I don’t see those titles and I don’t see that escalation in my career, how do I assign value to what I’ve done and how do I show that value to other people? And so we’re very intentional in our meetings with people. We have them every six months with team members.

We don’t want them just sitting at a keyboard banging away, putting the blinders on, look up in five years and say, oh my God, what have I done with my career? My resume sucks. I don’t know what I’m doing. And because we don’t have those titles, it’s not as in your face that you are progressing. And so we talk with them and we bring it up and we overly express to them, what do you like? What do you don’t like? And we talk in the term of roles. I know it’s nuanced.

people say, well, then you have titles. And it’s like, well, no, our business cards don’t have titles, but we talk about roles. And that’s what people should be responsible and accountable for and understanding that they’re doing the things that role implies and needs and then when they have a clear picture of that, I tell them, look, put on your resume, you can put you to the VP of technology, I don’t care. But what you’re going to sell that next employer of yours is gonna be.

those roles and the things that you actually did, you know, they’re not so much going to care about the title. I know you think they do. And, and especially with customers is where we see that a lot. Uh, our people are like, well, they don’t know. They’re not going to know. I’m the manager. They’re not going to know that I’m running this thing. And it’s like, they, they won’t initially, you’re right. But once you’ve interacted with them, it’s going to be abundantly clear exactly what it is you do on this and they can call it whatever they want to call it at that point.

Ben Johnson
But just so, so that’s kind of how we work around it is just, yeah, making sure they’re aware of it.

Sam Olmsted
That makes sense. I mean, for me personally, I was, you know, it was a confidence thing. I was a young, young employee and I wanted something that I could point to and say, this is what I’m good at or known for. As my career has gone on, it’s mattered less to me just because I have more confidence and less imposter syndrome. So I was curious about how your team.

Ben Johnson
Yeah.

You got past imposter syndrome because I have not. I would love to chat offline as to how you did that. Okay.

Sam Olmsted
I’m deep in it. I’m deep in it, but I think I’m farther away than I was when I was 22. So Yeah, do you have any other questions?

Ben Johnson
Good.

Meara McNitt
All right, we have time for one more question. So I just want to ask, what do you think is the value of having a tech company outside of Silicon Valley, especially in Western Louisiana or central?

Ben Johnson
Cool.

Ben Johnson
Yeah, South Central. It’s.

Ben Johnson
I think the biggest thing for me is there’s no biases. One, you go to Silicon Valley, you go to Austin, you go to these different places, and there’s a certain feel and expectation of what people have or what they feel is going to be needed of them in the tech industry. And there’s a certain perception as to what they should do and how they should work and what should be important to them. That’s…

That’s already been defined in those areas. And so to overcome some of those hurdles, if you’re a startup business there, it’s tough to be unique, it’s tough to be creative. And we need that in our line of business. We’re problem solvers, we’re a service company, we’re helping our customers with their challenges, with their issues, and we need people to be creative. And so without those biases, people come in and they really have a kind of a clean slate to work with and they can define how they need to do the work and how they can do the work.

what gets performed and also another good thing is we only have one big competitor here in town and so the university, you know, there’s not many people competing against us for the workforce. So that’s another great benefit to being in a non-traditional tech space.

Meara McNitt
Yeah, well.

We’re going to wrap it up now, so thank you so much for joining us. If someone wants to find you or Techneaux out on social media, where would they do that?

Ben Johnson
It was great to be here. Thanks so much.

Ben Johnson
Yep, they can go to techneaux.com. It’s T-E-C-H-N-E-A-U-X, the Cajun spelling. And then, yeah, we’re on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Meara McNitt
All right, well, thanks so much, Ben. So interesting hearing about how your different models and hopefully other entrepreneurs are hearing this and kind of take these methods to their businesses.

Ben Johnson
Yeah, I hope so. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Sam Olmsted
All right, thanks, Ben. Have a good one.