Jackson Fregeau - CEO - Quandri

0:00 hey guys I'm Jackson R the host of the one andone podcast we're super excited to release season 3 and in season 3 we're going to be rolling out a new theme to the podcast so over the first two years our theme has been interviewing younger successful people in any white collar business really just trying to teach our college students and anybody out there trying to figure out what they want to do at a young age what

0:19 businesses exist with season 3 we're taking a level deeper and we're going to be interviewing people who are either co-founders or SE level Executives at a very young age so going from what they're doing in business to really showing that Pinnacle of success what it looks like to run a company to found a company to struggle of an entrepreneur and what it looks like to grow a business and to lead people we're super excited and we want to welcome you to

0:42 season 3 of the one andone [Music] podcast all right everybody welcome back to another season of the one andone podcast season 3 uh episode three we're here with Jackson fro I think I got it right right Jackson you got it all right was practicing earlier Jackson fio he's the co-founder and CEO of quandry um in season 3 like we've been saying all along this is more about getting you with the higher level people some young guys who are who are founders who are

1:14 se- Level Executives and just having highle business conversation showing you what it's like whenever you get to that next level of business so Jackson man thank you for joining uh I know me and you go back to some some business of Our Own in the insurance world but excited to have you on today yeah thanks Jackson really excited to be here yeah and it's it's early for you right what is is it s right now it is it is just after 7 am

1:35 but longer up here in Canada so it's not bad sun's out I better say it looks it looks bright so you're you're good to go man yeah um no hey give the listeners a little bit of your background I know like I said me and you we we work together a little bit in the business right now and and been very impressed with the little time we've known each other uh and and what I've known about

1:52 you but uh give the give the listeners a little bit of your background and kind of your story yeah so kind of background on me or on the on the company give it give a little bit of both tell us about you and then tell us about the company we'll go from there yeah sounds sounds good so I grew up in a a small town in Northwestern Ontario town called canora um beautiful beautiful town around uh a

2:13 lot of big beautiful lakes which is really where I spent my time growing up um we had a cabin on the lake where I spent like all my Summers I've got two brothers so grew up with my brothers down there and uh went to high school there you know played uh played fairly competitive hockey growing up and then decided I wanted to go to you know wanted to go to university and ended up doing my undergrad out in Calgary I was

2:39 uh I was always really interested in entrepreneurship and business um didn't really know when going to school like how you turn that into something at that point though and like growing up in a growing up in a small town you don't actually have a lot of there's not a ton of models of like entrepreneurship there's you know people who like run their own construction company um or then there's sort of the like sole Proprietors there's the you know there's

3:06 the lawyers they the doctors or like there's the there's the insurance brokers but I didn't really see like a model of um model of like entrepr creating something new right yeah yeah yeah that I want it to be so I did a finance degree I liked math um when and did that and then worked for a sort of as I was going through my finance degree realized you know that that wasn't what I wanted to do and really what I wanted

3:27 to do was sort of startups and and Entrepreneurship so I went and worked for a startup uh right out of school we were basically three employees I was the I was the third employees third employee and you know my title was like operations manager or something but I was effectively like the EA to the CEO right I would and I wanted to just go work with somebody who was building a company I wanted to be right there so I

3:49 was you know writing process documents I was doing Financial modeling uh I started you know budgeting and then I started hiring people then I started managing CL so ended up being CFO HR manager everything you got to be a small company right yeah exactly right kind of kind of doing it all and ended up being the uh ended up being the COO there after about a year year and a half um and we we built a you know we built a good little

4:15 business like we got to uh you know we were about 35 employees or so by the time I left we had a good customer base um but I was at this point really interested in doing something on my own you know had done it for a few years there I had a a great mentor um who taught me a lot gave me a lot of autonomy and opportunity and I really got to see firsthand like how to build a

4:42 business but without my money right with somebody else's money and you know I didn't have an ownership stake or Equity or anything like that best way to start entrepreneurship right it is like that's your that's your that's your MBA right is actually doing it and learning um so then I was I was kind of having that I'm like you know what like I think I can do this like why am I doing it for somebody else like I think I can do it for myself

5:05 and uh my brother Jameson he was in a he was uh finishing up a software engineering degree and at that company I had built an automation program to automate a lot of the work that my operations team had been doing and that worked pretty well and you know was looking around at sort of different businesses that I knew and other friends in businesses and those types of things and didn't see anybody using this type of Technology

5:33 but saw how valuable it would be um for basically you know and basically this is kind of spinning into what we do at quandry but effectively like robots as a service is really what we what we do um and to explain that a little bit more basically software robots sort of on demand to solve problems of high volume repetitive manual work in systems that don't have great API access is sort of sort of what we're doing so anyways so

6:04 is it is a RPA essentially I've heard that term thrown around recently is that like what is it robot for process automation or something like that is that is that what you guys build essentially yeah so it's actually shifted a little bit over the last few years so that's how we started right we were vertical RPA so robotic process automation vertical just meaning you know uh focusing on a single vertical our vertical being you know insurance

6:27 which is obviously how how you and I know each other um so started off doing sort of vertical RPA so kind of producti robots to solve you know these repetitive problems over the last few years that's that's shifted a little bit where now we utilize a lot uh we utilize a lot more so we do you know we utilize machine learning we use OCR we use a lot sort of more Advanced Technologies as well where the RPA is

6:50 kind of the hands and feet and then you know we're extracting the data analyzing it recommending decisions back on that so what we call it uh is more intelligent automation than than RPA at this point but yeah that's that's in not AI yeah yeah exactly you got it and no that that that is really cool that's a great background just just kind of recap so we always talk about this on the first two seasons of one and done but I

7:15 always tell people like if you're young and you want to excel in a business solve problems and it sounds like you basically started in a business had to have your hands in lots of different things HR Finance operations and you basically found problems uh you found a way to solve them through Automation and then that ended up turning into a business and now you are a founder and a CEO of your own company does that sound

7:35 about right that's that's pretty right yeah and I think like early on in that first business I was in like the reason I got so much opportunity is because I was just I wanted to solve problems right like I took on whatever my boss wanted to give me I worked really hard to solve that and like did all the stuff that he didn't want to do or couldn't do and and helped him do that and that like

7:57 that gives you more opportunity it does you know and let's let's talk about that for just a minute because I I'm not really sure actually where problem solving comes from I'm not sure if it's something that you're maybe trained on early on in your childhood I'm not sure if it's something that maybe it's it just you know if you're you're creative and it it piqu your interest or something like that for you where where do you think that comes from where do

8:18 you think like that that desire to solve problems comes from because that's something like I I tell every college student like figure out a way to solve problems and we're just ingrained sometimes through through traditional universities stuff to to answer questions but answering questions is not solving problems they they can be it can be but not always you have to get better at asking questions than answering them um so where do you think that comes from

8:41 yeah it's a good question um I think there's probably a couple pieces to it like I think autonomy and confidence are actually part of it um as is as is critical thinking and the reason why like I think you I think sometimes people feel like they don't have the confidence to solve a problem that they like need to go to somebody who's got more experience or more authority to answer that thing for them um and I think what you learn like one

9:14 one thing that I learned is that anybody who's been successful doing something they had no idea what they were doing when they started and they have a bit more of an idea now yep but they do not have it figured out abolutely like everybody's kind of figuring it out as they go and once you realize that you just realize that like it's on you to figure out what those problems are and how to solve them and you need to have

9:36 like the confidence to believe in yourself to be able to do it so I think for me that's like I me number one is my parents like you know my parents are incredible um you know pushed us but not in like a not at all in a in an aggressive way you know gave us lots of autonomy and Independence to like make our own decisions taught us critical thinking um so I think it sort of starts starts there um and I

10:03 had some amazing teachers as well who I think back on like one in particular I remember my my physics teacher in high school who forced you to think right like you would go to him go to him with a problem and he would just Socratic method you he would you know you'd ask him a question and he'd you know ask you a question back and then you'd answer your you'd answer his question and he ask you another question another

10:28 question and he would he wouldn't answer anything and he would just lead you to showing you that you could actually solve the problem right answer start asking the questions yep absolutely yeah you know it's it's interesting too and and one of the things I want to get into is like some early Inspirations for for you I know you mentioned you know you're you like to read so I'd be interested to hear you know some of the books that maybe were

10:50 inspiring you to become an entrepreneur but one of the probably the craziest things when you're running a business I don't know if it's for you I know it is for me is that you have to set the direction and the pace and you spend so so much of your time looking 6 months 12 months into the future you know 5 years into the future 10 years into the future if you're doing it the right way that

11:06 sometimes you have to just be reminded to be present in the moment uh Not Looking Backward for mistakes to avoid or not looking forward for opportunities to attack but just kind of being uh okay with what's going on right right then and there there's a balance to everything in life but what are some of those Inspirations for you that kind of keep you going keep keep quandre moving forward um what are those things that kind of drove you to want to be an

11:27 entrepreneur and ask those questions to solve those problems yeah happy to dig into that and I think that I think that point you brought up is really interesting probably worth coming back to cuz I've been thinking about that a lot recently of like focusing on you know the present and how to how to manage that properly um but for me the you know the biggest Inspirations for me were were books um to do to do what

11:50 we're doing um I love to read you know my my whole family does um and I was really inspired by a lot of of biographies um biographies of entrepreneurs biographies of uh other great people who've done who've done amazing things I think my my favorite It's actually an autobiography not a not a biography but you Nelson Mandela autobiography long walk to Freedom one of the most amazing books I've ever read um you know presidential biographies

12:20 people who've done people who've done or accomplished amazing things entrepreneurial bios like Steve Jobs Elon Musk Jeff Bezos you know those those stories and I think what those show you is that you know anybody who who goes and does these things like yes they're smart yes they're capable but they're not really all that different from you or I right what they've done is they've like put it on the line and they've chosen to

12:51 go down this path and they've chosen to take risk and they've chosen to like bet on themselves yeah believe in themselves absolutely I I think that's that's something that that that you're not always trained or taught to do um you know you're taught to maybe stick within the system or to to to go find a job and work for somebody and there's nothing really wrong with that but at the end of the day when you see people I was

13:10 talking to somebody earlier this week and they're like hey I like to hunt right I've never been on an exotic hunting ranch and said hey where do you work and them say oh I work for this place you know they always say oh I own this right so the freedom financially that comes with being a founder and owner really comes with the financial you know what's the opposite of Freedom uh that that you start out with right

13:29 whenever you're bootstrapping it from the ground up uh and building something so no I love that and I think there's a lot of things you can learn from from other people like you mentioned the the love of biographies and stuff because at the end of the day the things that they did you might not do those things but but you'll probably take some of the the lessons and apply them to your life and uh I'm sure they've helped quandre out

13:48 am I right on that AB yeah AB absolutely yeah and I think and then I think the other piece is is mentorship right like finding really good mentors people who are you know 10 years head of you in whatever you're going to do like that's been key for my for my career and my growth super important yeah talk about that tell me tell me how you've kind of developed some mentors how how that's worked how you've connected with them

14:10 and then kind of what they do for you maybe on a consistent basis yeah so it's combination of a few different things like my you know I've always had my boss has always been a mentor for me so my you know two previous jobs my direct boss were were both really great mentors for me um outside of that there's a combination of both sort of formal mentorship like we have advisers at quandre and those are like formal agreements um but those

14:39 usually start informally right it starts from meeting somebody through a connection at an event whatever it might be and I think by being you know you and I are both both young and like we started the business a few years ago like people who have who have gone through their career and they see somebody who's you know young ambitious curious who wants to learn people want to give back right so if you're like if you're coming with like an open mind

15:09 kind of putting your ego at the door asking really good questions like really wanting to learn from them people want to give back Y and then like that turning into like more formal mentorship or advisory is like that happens later but like you're getting the mentorship early on from just sort of seeking it out and and wanting it and like really really asking for it yep I think there's certain level of humility too like you mentioned I mean you know it's not

15:32 exactly the most fun thing ever to just cold tell somebody hey I don't know what I'm doing can you help me out right there takes a certain level of humility to say hey I need some help I need I need somebody who can teach me you know what I need to do and how I need to do it and uh I'm looking for any advice to to get better and I think when you do that like you said people are open

15:50 they're willing they're willing to share um so for you right now and quandre right what are what are like your big things because I think one of the things that I found to be very unique about Founders sea level members anybody in a leadership position that has to set the tone the pace and the vision for a company um you always have something that's kind of on your mind whether that's a combination of what you've been

16:11 hearing in podcasts reading in books watching on television or sports like there's always something that is driving you and I think uh really good Founders and entrepreneurs are the ones who can take those things internalize them and then kind of build them out in terms of a process so what are the things for you right now that you're just kind of thinking about as as it relates to making your company better so there's there's this there's

16:33 one thing I'm thinking a lot about right now and it's it's sort of interconnected from a few different things and it ties back to what you what you said around kind of saying you know having having a longer range plan but staying focused in the moment so you know with our business we're about three and a half years old now and when we started we started by doing sort of Technology Services we were sort of building different B in

16:59 different areas we kind of did this these effectively like technology Consulting with like longtail recurring revenue and then we you know decided to focus on insurance then we decided to build these products that we have now in Insurance um but for a long time even though we've been like very focused on the insurance agency vertical I felt like we've been sort of unfocused with our product strategy and then we haven't really had a you know we haven't really

17:27 had a North star of where we're going with our product strategy we've known what we've been building in the you know the next 3 months the next 6 months but it's been more reactive to like customer problems and pain which is good early on like it allows you to find those problems and those pain points but it's not going to be great over a fiveyear you know 10e period so what we've been doing a lot of recently is really is

17:51 focus like eliminating all of the non-essential stuff getting rid of the things that are like good opportunities right that aren't like the sort of great opportunities that are really going to drive us drive us where we need to be over the next over the next 10 years and making that sort of shift in focus is quite hard um because there's all this like organizational entropy that's M oh yeah no we're we're there too man yeah I

18:18 mean you're you're fighting against your your every single day right and and I was telling this to one of my Executives earlier this week I'm like whenever you have the most things coming at you in life and in business sometimes it forces you every couple years it's like spring cleaning but it's with your calendar with your clients like you have to look at it and say all right what of this have I been just picking up over the last couple of years

18:38 that I feel like has been successful maybe you're being successful but for me to get to the next level there's going to be something here that I have to purge and it's pretty easy when you look at your calendar you're like oh yeah that doesn't have to happen that doesn't have to happen you know and then all of the sudden you have all this time to then focus on the things that are the most important but like you said it's

18:55 very difficult um to do that on your own like one of the pie of advice I have for for anybody who's in that situation bring somebody in you trust and let them look at your calendar let them look at your inbox uh for me it's my dad you know he's one of my best mentors our new coo is another guy for us and and I let them look at like my inbox and they're like why are you answering that right

19:15 like that didn't even go to you but there's things that we just take because we feel like we can do them the best and maybe we can but the best thing for the company is for us to get those off of our plate and to really focus on the future and I think you have to continually do that and I don't think that that's something you do one time and then you're done I think you have to

19:30 do it almost every year every 6 months um because you're just naturally going to wander you know a little bit off course and have to to course correct yeah 100% I think that's like one of the hardest parts of growing your business and scaling it is scaling yourself right um really really tough like I'm I'm curious how you've like how have you approached that Jackson because I know you guys like when we were talking whenever that was a few a few months ago

19:55 like you guys were onboarding 25 people in a week um so you guys you know it seems like you guys have been growing quite a bit so I'm curious like at that sort of pace how do you how do you think about scaling yourself and how do you go about doing that yeah you know it that's been a big thing for me this year like one of the things for me that's that's been weighing on me is is just

20:13 discipline and uh and and it's not really because i' I've always had moments of discipline in my life uh whenever I was you know playing basketball all the time in high school we would lose a tournament and I'd be very disciplined the next like month right because I was like I don't want to lose again but then you you get in moment of winning and maybe the discipline you know you I'm not going to go to the gym today I'm going to watch

20:32 some TV instead right same thing in your business and for me discipline is about the fact that I've been in charge of you know people for essentially the last two years took over basically as president of the company is 24 um and I've had to figure out how to hold other people accountable and then that leads to maybe me not holding myself accountable all the time uh so for me man this whole Year's been about discipline it's been

20:54 about wake up early I don't like to do that work out I don't like to do that right like do things that I don't like to do because then it makes me hold myself accountable and that helps me progress as well so for me I I've never been a reader like I I you know love the fact you said you love to read I've read more books this year and listen to more podcasts than probably I have the rest

21:11 of my entire life I mean I think in the month of March or no we just finished April yeah in April I think I put down like 30 something podcasts like I'm averaging a podcast a day just because I I set some time aside to do those things and then when you do that you just fall in love with learning and you might be learning about something in sports right but the reality is just sometimes resetting your brain uh helps you to

21:31 come back to a problem with the first perspective and answer it so for me man it's been about about discipline saying hey if I don't take care of myself how am I going to take care of my team uh and that's been a big thing because whenever I'm always pushing everything out uh it's hard to reset my brain so every once in a while you got to pull information in reset yourself and then you can continue pushing out good

21:52 messages good culture and those kind of things um how do you do it what's your what's your kind of approach to to you know getting better yeah you know I've had to like similar to you I've really tried to focus on that this year like we've gone through when you're starting out like you know when you're starting a company like it is just a grind there is no oh yeah you're trying to survive yeah there's no there's no nice way to put it

22:14 right you're working non-stop like six seven days a week for years and you just have to like there's no there's no work life balance there can't be like you're just you're putting everything you have into it right but then you get to a certain point where like that is is no longer the best thing for the company and that takes that's a hard mental switch cuz you're used to doing that but then like you know you're making you're

22:36 maybe not making the best decisions or you're like two in the weeds focused on just executing so you actually miss some important strategic decisions and that happened with us and there were actually these like couple strategic decisions that we missed and it and it cost the company um not you know not anything irrecoverable or anything like that but it was like you know these significant um significant decisions that we would have been much better off had we seen

23:03 and made much earlier and at that point I really realized like I'm not actually acting as the CEO I'm acting as like an operations manager and a sales rep and you know a marketing manager and an HR Manager and all this all this stuff and you know forc me to really think about scaling myself and then also like how I can hold myself accountable to make sure that I am in the best frame of mind to

23:28 make the right decisions to like see the forest through the trees and make sure that all the stuff we're doing is sort of part of this part of this cohesive hole and for me one of the most valuable things that I did like I've always you know I've always loved Sports um I've always loved exercising and like being in good shape like I care about my health have not at all for the last three years right it's just kind of

23:50 Fallen Fallen by the wayside and I've had a really hard time holding myself accountable to like going to the gym going for a run whatever it might be cuz there's always always more work there's always like another thing to handle so one of the best things I did was I just got a trainer so like I pay for a trainer once a week and like this was a really hard mental flip for me I'm like I'm not the kind of person that needs a

24:11 trainer like I know how to work out I know how to go to the gym but like it's the accountability it's like I know that at 7:00 a.m. on Tuesdays that like I need to go be at the gym cuz Michael's there waiting for me and I've paid for it so I go I have a great workout and like that's just created this like virtuous cycle for me where like now I want to go for runs more and I

24:30 want to be on my bike more and like it it forces me uh to be to take care of myself and that's been really really helpful is like forced accountability because sometimes like I agree with you it's hard to hold yourself accountable sometimes yep absolutely no I think you got to have somebody else there um you know discipline here's the thing that's a that's a you know you do that uh but there's nothing wrong with putting you

24:50 know checks in place to help you with that along the way as you kind of build out um build out those things for yourself so kind of as we as we wind close man I've Lov this this has been good just a lot of lot of good information what is what is your number one piece of advice for young entrepreneurs or people who maybe want to be you know an entrepreneur or get into you know founding a company or

25:09 anybody who's an executive uh or trying to trying to work their way there what is what is your number one piece of advice for them yeah I would say you know if it's somebody that wants to be an entrepreneur um just do it like it's it sounds yeah it sounds really TR you hear it all the time right that starting is the hardest part but starting is the hardest part like it's so hard to take that first step and start something and

25:38 it feels so risky at the time um but once you start like you realize this after you start where you start is not where you're going to be in a year it's not where you're going to be in six months the idea is going to change a lot but like once you've started then you have something to work from right you have something to Pivot from you have something to talk about like just getting that Forward Motion in place is

26:00 so so so important and it's going to grow and evolve from there I think go ahead no I was going to say it's crazy how much it evolves from there me and you were talking before we got on right and where we started four years ago kind of on our growth Mission I look back now and I'm like we were crazy that was a terrible idea right but but it but it just changes so much over time that it's

26:19 the same idea but it's it's had you know we're at version like 11 or 12 now and you look back at version one and you're like that was absolutely terrible um I mean I look back at some of the stuff I've done with this podcast or other things you're like man that was terrible quality but the reality is you're just moving you're moving what uh good or successful looks like forward a little bit each day uh you know it's that idea

26:38 of 1% better right if you get 1% better every day you're going to look back in two years and be like I can't believe I was ever at that State but it takes that consistent discipline to get there for sure yeah and it takes having that something to get 1% better from right you can procrastinate by like you know listening to podcasts and like thinking about it but like you just you need to act and do it and once you've done that

26:58 you have a base a base to improve from um yeah so I think that's probably the most you know the most most important piece I think the you know the one other thing I'll say is like for you know for entrepreneurship everybody always talks about how much of a risk it is right big risk you know betting your career whatever whatever it might be you know if you're in your 20s so like I we started quandry when I was

27:23 25 um what was I giving up you know after most like I was giving up you know my savings cuz had to live off that for a little while and you know two years of salary at most right I would be 27 by the time if it didn't go well over two years you know I'd be 27 and I could get a job and I have the rest of my career to earn that salary like the risk is actually

27:48 when you think of the sort of possible return the risk is actually very small yep you know when you're young it gets bigger as you get older right once you have a career and you have a wife and kids and a mortgage and all that stuff then it's real oh yeah for sure I got I got uh my second one on the way here soon so yeah I know yes you've got that but like early on it's like there's not

28:10 really a risk like there is but it's small the the bigger risk is like not doing that thing you really want to do and regretting it you know 20 years later in my op you know what I I think the one piece of advice I take from today's episode um is I I think that a lot of times people don't realize that every decision you make has some consequence to it that might be a good that might be a good consequence or a

28:36 bad consequence or reaction to those decisions uh and I think a lot of times like you mentioned you know y'all missed a decision and that was because you know you were too focused on something the reality is you have to take some risk even along the way even when you don't have to live off of your savings because the business is successful you have to keep thinking that way in the reality the future you're you're kind of you're

28:57 kind of building out what it's going to look like along the way and uh you know it's just it you have to put it in the time you have to start I agree with you um and if I take anything out of today's episode man it's it's when you start something believe in it um build it with your family I mean how fun is that right to be able to do with your brother and I'm sure you guys have some fun family

29:16 dinners and work is in quandry is the topic of discussion probably way too often and you have to turn it off but it's a beautiful thing when you have those opportunities in front of you and I mean you look back and say hey got One Life to Live right this is the this is the way I want to do it when it comes to work this is how I want to do it and this is who I want to do it with there's

29:32 probably nothing more fun than that y couldn't couldn't agree more you've got one shot at it so you might as well make it make it worth it yep no I I appreciate it man hey thank you very much for joining us uh really really appreciate it I mean look got the got the best name out there even spilled the correct way right Jackson with the CK appreciate it man uh and uh best of luck to you and quandry and uh excited to

29:54 excited to see where you guys go in the future yeah thanks Jackson really really uh really great to be here thanks for having me I'll see you uh I'll see you in a couple months in uh in Texas I think yes sir see you man see you [Music]