I recently went one-on-one with Jeremy Suard, co-founder and CEO of Exodigo.
Adam: I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Jeremy: I currently live in Florida, but I have a multi-cultural past. Born and raised in France, I moved to Israel as a teenager and served in an elite intelligence unit focused on AI and signal processing after earning my degree in physics. I’ve been immersed in so many cultures throughout my life, and like to think I kept the best parts of each. Being fluent in multiple languages certainly helps when running a global company.
In terms of specific situations that have been most instrumental in my growth, I think navigating personnel challenges has helped mold my leadership style and how I approach scaling our company. Since founding Exodigo, we’ve grown at an incredible pace, and like any high-growth startup, we’ve had periods where we needed to grow our team and services faster than we could build out the team. Each bandwidth growing pain came with another lesson in scale. We’ve also had to diligently work to create synergies, balance, and understanding across our globally dispersed teams. Luckily, we have built an incredibly hardworking and devoted team that works well together to achieve any goal while spread across time zones and continents.
Adam: How did you come up with your business idea and know your business idea was worth pursuing?
Jeremy: I wanted to apply breakthrough technology to a previously insurmountable challenge. No single sensor or technology tool can properly “see” below the surface. Understanding the underground is a massive problem faced by so many industries. Every year, more than $100B is spent on excavation and drilling because infrastructure owners, engineering, and construction teams don’t have an accurate, complete view of what lies under the surface. Every capital project is impacted by risks associated with inaccurate underground data, a primary concern being utilities. But there was no technology available that could reliably remove those risks.
It was clear that creating a solution to accurately and non-intrusively map the underground using multiple sensors and AI could become a disruptive force. We decided to pursue underground utility detection as a first step because it was a clear, immediate need for so many. More importantly, we knew we had to be the best at it. Eventually, we will solve an even broader set of underground investigation challenges with our technology, but we knew utilities were the starting point.
Adam: What advice do you have for others on how to come up with and test business ideas?
Jeremy: Know your mission and your brand and stay true to it. Don’t let technology buzzwords, market whims, or misaligned, fleeting goals detract from your vision. If potential investors, customers, partners, or employees don’t share your passion and see the value in your technology solutions, move on and find ones who do. Trust your brand compass.
Adam: What are the key steps you have taken to grow your business? What advice do you have for others on how to take their businesses to the next level?
Jeremy: As entrepreneurs are creating their business growth playbooks, the most important decision to make is your business model. And in today’s tech landscape, that means deciding whether to be a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) company or not. While building a SaaS company is easier at the beginning and requires less capital to be successful, SaaS companies (with very few exceptions, like Microsoft) don’t typically go on to become trillion-dollar brands. I wanted to build a huge brand, so Exodigo was not built as a SaaS company.
It takes time and commitment to succeed. For any disruptive technology to succeed, you need to prove the technology works and demonstrate how you can drive value for your customers. Early on, be ready to spend money on pilots. Prove that your technology delivers on its promises, and the contracts will happen.
Once you know your model and have proven your technology, focus on expansion. Adding new logos to your client list is important, but building out your services within your existing client base is what will drive the most substantial growth.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Jeremy: Many CEOs become completely removed from the sales cycle after hiring a VP of Sales when they start to grow. This is an enormous mistake. CEOs should never hang up their sales hat, especially if they want to drive major market disruption.
As the company scales, a CEO should do more business development. While I am a technologist at my core, I understand that technology solutions only thrive if they provide customer value. Working alongside your sales team to ensure customer satisfaction should be a top priority at every step of your growth path.
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Jeremy: AI is undoubtedly driving the biggest transformation across industries at the moment. Companies stuck in inaction while they speculate about whether AI is a bubble or not are making a potentially devastating mistake. The cost of not actively embracing AI as a company is huge. Those who don’t put effort into figuring out the most effective ways to tap into the power of AI to grow their business will be out of the game, while companies who find the right way(s) to leverage AI to stay lean and drive their product roadmap will thrive. For us, AI has been a critical factor in the automation of work behind new product offerings so our team can make the most of their skills and individual expertise by focusing on the deliverables and priorities that matter most.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jeremy: The defining qualities of an effective leader are ambition and the ability to learn.
Ambition cannot be taught, so if you have to convince a leader to want more and to push to continue growing, they are not going to be effective. Similarly, the best leaders will always have a thirst for more knowledge. If you want to improve your skills and grow a strong company, you need to learn from your clients, your partners, and your team.
The same need to constantly learn, evolve, and do more is also applied to the problems their customers face. Leaders don’t view problems as a dead end, but as yet another opportunity to learn. An example of the constant need to learn and evolve is how our team dove into a completely new way to deliver our maps as we started working more closely with our customers’ engineering teams. It became clear that they needed maps that met CAD engineering standards, so we solved the problem. Our team learned how to code in an entirely new format, BIM – it wasn’t easy, but it was necessary to bring as much value to our customers as possible. And now, the ability to provide maps that are BIM-compliant has opened up additional business opportunities for us. Solving problems strengthens your business.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Jeremy: The more companies grow, the more leadership layers there are. It isn’t enough to hire top talent; you need to hire people that are better than you in different areas. This is true across all levels of the organization.
Leaders also need to ensure that their employees understand their path forward and how they can grow within their team and the company. But growth is not the same for all employees. For some, management may not be their end goal. They need to be put on a path where climbing in the ranks doesn’t mean they need to manage more people, and given a path to make powerful contributions to the company that don’t include a tier of an org chart reporting into them. Some employees like to roll up their sleeves and “do the work,” and empowering them to be able to do that is critical to retaining their talent.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Jeremy:
- Chase a big problem with a big market – it is hard to succeed when you build a business to solve small problems.
- You need to want to disrupt an entire market, not just provide a piece of the solution.
- Like a top boxer, you need to be able to continue after taking big hits. A door closing or a failure can’t get you down. Stand strong and keep fighting.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Jeremy: This is always a hard one – there have been so many pieces of advice along the way that I have taken with me and have become a part of my leadership style and approach.
One thing that I think can often be extremely hard for CEOs is knowing when it is time to let someone on the team go. I have been mentored over the years from other CEOs about this in many ways. One leader told me that “you will never regret letting someone go, but you might regret keeping them on too long.” The impact of an underperforming or ill-suited manager, employee, or leader sends ripples through the company that may not be fully understood until they are no longer in that role. The pressure to change roles on a team, move someone to another program, or let someone go should never have to come from the bottom up. If it does, you’ve already waited too long. Never put yourself or your company at risk of losing other employees or momentum by being blind to necessary changes across your team.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Jeremy: Exodigo is reshaping mega infrastructure projects with subsurface intelligence. We are working to bring AI efficiency and risk reduction to all facets of the transportation and infrastructure industries that rely on accurate knowledge of what’s underground. We are constantly finding new problems to solve and new ways to apply our technology while working with our global team and customers. We will continue to evolve to meet our customers’ needs and provide value, and that is why I know we will succeed.
