#276 Mastering the Fundamentals of Tech Consultancy: Insightful Strategies and AI Application with Anupam Singh

0:00:01 - Mehmet
Hello and welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me from Melbourne, australia, anupam Singh. Anupam, thank you very much for being with me on the show today. The way I like to do it is I let my guests introduce themselves, because I believe no one can introduce someone else better than themselves. So the floor is yours. 

0:00:24 - Anupam
First of all, thanks, mehmet, for having me. It's a pleasure and honor to be here. Introduction wise look, I'm a learner. I'm a lifelong learner. I mean I titles. I don't believe much in titles, but currently I'm the CEO of my company. It's a boutique consulting firm and we specialize in of fundamentally aligning process, people and technology. 

In the current time in the world, a lot of people are quite blown away with AI and big data and everything else, and it kind of seems that processes and the simple things like you know, ensuring that your processes are in sync with your tools and technologies and people it's starting to take a back burner and I'm trying to bring it back to the front and center of the conversation in the consulting world, and it's not an easy conversation because, as I said, people are. 

People are always running behind the new and shiny toys, right? So AI and, obviously, big data, et cetera, have become the talk of the town. However, I still want to make sure that people do not forget the fundamentals of running a business and ensuring that the processes are robust, as they should be, and one other thing that I also try to do is ensure that people understand the importance of implementing processes before they implement their technologies, because oftentimes we see people implementing technology and then the people have to then rummage through and figure out the process around that technology, which can be disastrous in many instances. I've seen many examples of that in my career. So, yeah, that's fundamentally what I do. I hope it made sense. 

0:02:10 - Mehmet
Yeah definitely, definitely. And, as you said, people can easily get Get drawn by you know, these new shiny toys, as you said. So 100% on this Now you know kind of a traditional question maybe, but what was, you know, the main reason that you know get you into the tech industry and you know what are like some of the pivotal moments that also shaped your career to become, you know, entrepreneur yourself and having your own, your own business. 

0:02:53 - Anupam
Sure. So People might laugh at this, but I, when I was in school, I had no idea what I would do, like every teenager and I, growing up in a country like India. For me I mean for my family at least my education was paramount and why my father wanted me to become a doctor. I somehow didn't want to and I chose the path of engineering. Even then I wasn't sure what to do, and I thank my dad for doing this. He actually IT wasn't a thing back then I'm talking 98, 97 back many, many years ago, and information technology and computer science as subjects were becoming more and more popular in India. And my father just said look, son, you're going into IT. I said, okay, as a teenager I had no idea what I was doing. I said, okay, fine, I'll take it, because I had no direction. So I just took the direction of my father and, by God, that was one of the best decisions ever. 

Once I finished engineering, I got into. My first job was at Microsoft as level three tech support. I did that for a few months and then I realized I was good with customers, I could speak to people, and that's that was big revelation to me from my personality perspective. I was good with problem solving and that came naturally to me because I stuck to basics. And that's one thing I always have done in my entire career in my life stick to the basics, because people get to bog down with the complicated terminologies and jargon and all sorts of things and then forget about the fundamentals, because the reality is, end of the day, it's the fundamentals that actually make things simpler, and I have always kept that philosophy with me until date. It has worked for me. 

So when I came to Australia, which was back in 2005, early 2005, and this is something I don't share with many people, but I was not able to find a job in my field, primarily because the excuse, or sorry, the response I was getting from potential employees was you're not a permanent resident, we cannot offer you a job, because that was a criteria of finding a job. So I created my own company. I mean, if no one is going to give me a job, how else will I learn? How else will I gain experience through? So I formed my own company and that was my first entrepreneurial gig, more out of desperation, I would say, but also out of the habit I've got of not taking no for an answer. So I said okay, fine, if you're not going to help me, I'll help myself. So I created my own company and then I started doing small gigs. 

I used to assemble PCs. I used to write software for factories. I started doing small gigs. I started doing small gigs. I started doing small gigs. I started doing small gigs. I started doing small gigs. I started doing small gigs. I used to write software for factories. I used to do troubleshooting for local. If anyone had any computer problems, I'll just go and fix it for them if I could. And that's how my journey began. 

But then there have been many moments since then, in the last 20 years. That was the beginning of the journey and, as you can see, I have been keen on technology, but creating an entrepreneurial path was also more out of frustration than anything, and it's worked well so far, so I'm happy that I made that decision. 

0:06:25 - Mehmet
Yeah, I love to hear these stories honestly, anupaya, because I can understand. We hear it a lot from people who are seeking jobs, especially in technology, and, to be honest, it's a crowded field. So sometimes I advise people maybe you need to go, think of doing things by yourself To create the thing that you would be able to do it. It's worth a try. Maybe you will fail Probably you will fail, and I tell people in entrepreneurship and I know from myself, you might fail 100 times, but it's worth trying to go and if it doesn't work with you, no problem, you can anytime. 

But now, having this knowledge and experience, and then you can go to the employers and say, hey, I have experience by trying myself on here, it's not a shame to go and try to work again and then try again to go and be an entrepreneur. I've seen people doing this a lot Now, while preparing Anupaya for today's episode, I went over the debrief that you have put and I went to your LinkedIn profile and you talk a lot and you emphasize a lot on simplifying complexity, and I love this. So I want to understand from you how you take something complex and simplify it to a client or maybe to your team and why this is always important when especially working in consultancy and technology consultancy. 

0:08:04 - Anupam
Right. So simplification again comes down to the basic concept of fundamentals. Stick to the basics that I always say, no matter how complicated the situation is. If you simply stick to the fundamentals of three to four things First, what's the underlying process? What's the underlying technology? What people are involved? 

Right, sometimes, occasionally, we have to consider the aspect of products as well. Utilizing all this you can when you put them aside and lay out on the field field map, if you may, and start looking at each one of them individually, you start to see gaps, will start to emerge, right, and as those gaps start to emerge, you start to zone into the problem statements problem areas. And okay, this process was meant to do this and this and this, but this application can only do this and this. So we are missing something there which the process wants you to do but the application won't deliver, or the other way around. Or you might come into some people aspects that hang on. We've got some good people in here, but you know some of them do not have the required skill sets to deliver task A, b and C. And that's not reflection on the people, it's just that it becomes more of a problem statement that, okay, that's a problem we need to solve, which means we train those people and get them up to scratch so they can be more productive. And products could be one thing, like you know. So specific products were defined or designed keeping in mind certain technologies and processes and people, and over a period of time, those things evolved or changed or whatever, but the product remained the same and then, consequently, everything else started to get misaligned. 

So when you break things apart, it's like a jigsaw puzzle. I see that as a jigsaw puzzle. You had this massive mess of jigsaw puzzle. But when you start to what I do, I normally start with the corners, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who does that, because finding the edges is a lot easier. So when you start looking at the corners, you start putting the puzzle together and suddenly it starts to take form. 

And the more form it takes, all of a sudden the rest of the puzzle pieces start to make more sense and you can start picking them up and putting them away and say hang on, that belongs there, that belongs there. And when you start piecing the puzzle, the picture starts to get much clearer. And that's fundamentally the sort of approach I've always taken and rather than getting too bogged down with fancy jargon and people talking about you know all sorts of terminologies and technologies and terms and all sorts of things. I ask simple questions like what process is it going to tackle, what problem is it going to solve and what are the people components involved? And once you understand all that, everything else basically starts to fall into place. 

0:11:03 - Mehmet
That's great, adhupam, and you know I think we share the same approach to tackle things and I want to jump on something related to that. So you said you know when you propose a solution or you try to get a problem solved. So you mentioned like you don't go to the jargon and you know the fancy stuff, but you try to find solution for the problem. But I'm sure that there will be some metrics. As a consultant, you know that you always try to get the business. You know see the benefits. So I know the answer. But I'm saying this for anyone you know who's about to start maybe his career or her career In this consultancy things. So what are like these metrics usually the business will focus on when you want to tackle a problem. 

0:12:02 - Anupam
So more than metrics is. I think metrics has come, obviously, at a later stage in time, but for me it's important that the business realizes what problem they're dealing with. Do they understand the problem well enough? Because half the time we hear a lot of people scream wolf, but when you dig deep, dive into it, the problem is actually entirely different. And problem could not be relatable at all. It could be something very either trivial or it could be something really, really complex, but the key is to first understand and deep dive into the problem. Once you understand the problem, then what needs to be understood is what's the benefit, realization of fixing that problem? 

Many times I've seen people getting too bogged on with the journey or the part sorry, the actual functionality of a particular tool or an application that they forget that it's actually not going to add much value to your bottom line If you think about it. So I think having the having an eye on the price is very important. I, on the price being the business needs to clearly realize what value are you trying to achieve in this particular instance and have you actually understood the problem statement that you're trying to fix? Those two needs to be simple statements. Your problem statements need to be very simple and your actual benefit realization needs to be very simple. Simple enough that anyone can read and understand. 

So, and obviously in terms of identifying the matrix, yes, once you understand the problem and once you understand the solution that you are trying to achieve, then you define a matrix to actually assess the success of your particular problem and how you actually solve that solution and anything in between. Obviously, whatever can be measured gets measured, but understanding the stakeholders I mean one of the matrices that I try to love to follow is obviously doing the stakeholder analysis to understand who and put a race together as well. That usually helps in defining the characters that you'll be dealing with along the way and who to keep happy and how to keep happy and who's going to be influential and who can impact your project either positively or negatively. So that people component also comes in, and it's usually for me that's very important because if you keep those people happy, ultimately the project can be delivered in a much better way. 

0:14:33 - Mehmet
Yeah, great approach, anupaya, and this is why I always and I repeated this on the show multiple times you know, consultancy, especially technology consultancy, it's very much similar to being an entrepreneur or startup founder, because your main issue is to find the problem, actually identify it, and then try to find out the best solution. And you know, when we talk about the problem. You mentioned something very, very. I love it actually, because, you know, sometimes now I do advisory for some startups and I tell them guys, is this a, you know, like the famous thing in Silicon Valley? They say is it a painkiller or a vitamin? Right? So? And in business world, or, let's say, an enterprise world, it is like is it have to have or good to have? So, because we see a lot of initiatives, hey, you know this AI thing, we need to find out and dig more how we can get it in our company. 

Sometimes I ask the question why do you need AI? And you know, majority of the time, people they don't have answer for this question. They don't know why they need AI and they say, okay, let's first try to find, you know, the problems that you have and see later if AI is the best fit for you, because maybe you don't need something sophisticated, complex and unfortunately, people and this is why I want to see your opinion on this and a plan and I see these people who jump on the one back and you know, like they see something fancy, they start to appear all over the place, they do speeches here and there and then they create this, you know, assumption in the head of some actual decision makers at companies that, oh, we're going to miss out if we don't do this. What's your take on this and how we can rectify and actually tell people guys, calm down. You need to take it step by step. You need to, as you said, go back to basics, understand your needs. 

But what are you seeing? You know, in this space, you know all these people that comes and talk and then you know they scare people. Sometime you're going to miss out. What's your take on that? 

0:16:57 - Anupam
It's actually. You're right, absolutely right. It's nothing but promo. We're missing out Because a lot of execs they want to be seen in good light. A lot of CTOs and CIOs that I've spoken to over the past few months Everybody has a similar sort of problem. 

They just have a fear of missing out, like their competitors. They are raving on about artificial intelligence and the reality is, like you said, many of them don't even know what AI is or AI means. They just think there is some machine that does magic and it spits out you know magical outcomes and ultimately it will fix everything for everyone. But the reality is the more you deep dive into it, and I've been part of recently been part of some symposiums and seminars where I won one I recently attended for Microsoft sorry led by Microsoft for the health industry. There are specific use cases that AI can benefit right, but it doesn't mean it's going to benefit the entire industry. Same applies for any industry. Two things matter how mature are your processes and how clean is your data, and fundamentally, not just clean, how clean and big is your data, because AI if anyone has a basic understanding of AI, it's a machine and you need to teach machine. 

I normally use AI as a six year old kid. The more you teach the kid, the more smarter and clever the kid becomes right. So the idea of AI is good, the concept is good, but then it comes down to how well are you teaching the kid and what examples are you using to teach the kid? Because your examples will define the interpretation of that particular kid and how that information will be utilized in the future growth of that particular child. So AI works in a similar way. If you have enough data, if you have enough information of a particular domain, you can train to create information nuggets that can be utilized by the machine and then it can form its own opinion and start to deduce or make its own deductions in your course. So it's basically garbage in, garbage out, right? So if your information is clean, yes, the AI will become smarter. 

If your information is not clean, the AI obviously will generate garbage information. So it's not just about having a machine. I mean it's end of the day, it's a machine learning concept, right? A machine needs to be taught something. How you teach it and what information you use to provide that teaching are components that companies need to focus on, unless they understand exactly and again comes down to see what I said before not understanding the problem statement. What are you trying to solve using the AI Problem statement versus your future goal, right? So if AI comes in there to achieve your future goal, then fine, go ahead. But you need to understand the problem statement as well. Plus, you understand what tasks and activities you need to perform in order to achieve that end goal that you're actually targeting 100%. 

0:20:12 - Mehmet
And again, you know the sentence you started with back to basics, right. So it all goes back to basics understanding what you're trying to achieve, actually figuring out what the problems that you have today and I think one of the and this is why I want to relate to the next question so one of the main things I start to notice is including myself and I'm not saying I'm excluded from this we started to act more reactive, rather than being a little bit, you know, taking one step ahead and trying to be kind of. You know having the strategic thinking right, and I know that you talk a lot about the strategic thinking, so can you, you know a little bit, shed some light on why strategic thinking is as an approach? Can, you know, affect and even change the outcome of a business or a project and how to start? You know what are the basic things that we need to do to have the strategic thinking. 

0:21:26 - Anupam
So again coming down to the basic constructs, and then I might start sounding like a broken record here, but ultimately, strategic thinking, in my opinion, is a simple three-step process Understand your current state, have a clear understanding of your future state and then have a clear roadmap on how you want to get from here to there. Usually people focus on the future state yes, they define it and they have a good understanding of the current state but then they don't necessarily put in all the right measures in between. Because, say, if you're putting together a three-year plan or a five-year plan, it's a long period of time, right? Anything can happen in three years. Anything can happen in five years time. So do you have enough future proofing in place? Do you have a good understanding of the current problems or the current challenges you're facing? Have you got a plan in place where you can start executing some simple steps, where you can do a bit of a litmus test on problem when it comes to problem solving, try an error and then learn from it and then improve and move ahead. So the agile thinking comes in there that you use the initial steps of the journey to make mistakes, learn from it and then you start running. So basically, first you start crawling, you make mistakes, you fall, you get up and then, as you get better and better and stronger and obviously in realizing the benefits, you can execute that at a much faster pace. 

So sorry I'm getting into the strategy implementation phase here, but to me, I mean, like I said, what's more important is to realize the current state. What exactly is not working? Why do you want to revisit your strategy and where exactly do you see the organization headed? One important aspect is the alignment with the organization. Many, many times what happens is at the top layer. 

The organization and obviously the execs are aligned. The CEOs, the CTO, the CEO, the CFO, they're all aligned. By the time it starts to cascade down, the alignment starts to go everywhere, and then people will wonder that actually, what went wrong? We had a good strategy. That's because when decisions are being made, people from the bottom or middle layer are not involved in those conversations, and that's always a problem, because you can come up with the best strategy in the world, but people who are going to implement that for you. If they are not on board, there's a good chance it's not going to work. So getting your people involved is absolutely necessary and that's something that doesn't happen very frequently, unfortunately 100% and to your point. 

0:24:21 - Mehmet
The thing I've seen, especially after some initiatives, is that they think it's a one-time job or one-time task or one-time project, and then things stops. Especially I don't want to call them buzzwords they are actually real things, real initiatives like digital transformation, for example, or digitalization some people they call it whatever or, for example, fortifying our cybersecurity, let's say and people think, ok, we do this project one time and then we are done, and then they forget exactly about what you just mentioned, which is the agile thing that you need to assign someone in the organization that his or her role is always to revise, and then you put some metrics, kpis, whatever you want to call them, and then when you start to see things degrading or changing, it's not rocket-sized. This is best practices in the agile methodology, even in startup course. This is the lean methodology also as well, where you try to pivot if things didn't work the way you wanted. So, yeah, I think these concepts need to be more and more educated by maybe, people like yourself, myself and a parent, because it's not one time and, unfortunately, people think some of the people, not all of them they think about it as a hit and run, and I'm talking here from commercial perspective. So, hey, I brought you this solution. It will make your organization look shiny, you will be the hero in front of the board, and then they go, they implement and they figure out you know what? 

Actually, we didn't change anything. Things start to get worse. We didn't fix the main problem. Actually, there was no problem for this solution. Actually, we had different problems that required different solutions, but unfortunately, again I see there is a lack of education in that domain, and this strategic thinking is really key and important. Now, Anupamayam also, you deal with a lot of clients and you deal with a lot of technologies. You mentioned AI, machine learning, data analytics. But what other trends, real trends? You see that they will be shaping the future for business in the coming. I don't know, I don't want to say five, 10 years, maybe up and down, three, four years from now. 

0:27:03 - Anupam
I'm a realist by nature, so I'm not going to probably touch on any potential trends as such, because trends are meant to be followed and then they fall. They basically fade away eventually. I'll give an example. A few years ago, scaled Agile came into practice and a lot of organizations implemented it left, right and center. And your loyal Agile was originally designed for the IT sector, right for development teams and it worked well in that particular environment. 

But then there came a time where everyone was implementing Agile all across an organization. I always saw that as a with a skeptic eye. I was like why are they doing it? It doesn't make sense to me. Why would you apply Agile in sales, right? Yes, there might be some good business cases out there, but it's not a one size fit all and that's something that organizations did. And now we've started to see some patterns within the industry that companies have started to realize that you know it's not working and now they're kicking out Agile out of the door. 

So the reason I use this as an example is same could happen with AI. Right now it's the buzzword. Yes, a few years ago, big data was the buzzword. Now we're coming up with data lakes. Also, some different fancy jargons are coming up in the market. 

So if I look at it from a simplistic lens and a lot of people might hate me for this comment but hey, we're just finding new ways of storing and interpreting data, right, but end of the day, we're just handling data, how we handle data. We have handled data in the past that, yes, it was complicated with the usual schema based table structures. You know the joints and the usual SQL queries that people have to run. And then now, with the advent of Azure and other other tools, it's becoming easier to load data and, with the concept of cloud coming and emerging over the last few years, a lot of information is basically stored in cloud and companies like Microsoft and AWS have made good money out of it Because, again, my opinion is, it's easy and secure and a companies have got less reliance on multiple vendors. 

They can basically put everything onto the cloud, and because all these big companies have got strong security and big infrastructures and stuff, it's a lot easier for them to maintain that information. But the harsh reality is that this is all it is. It's a bus. It's getting popular now, but there will come a time when people realize that you know what? It was? Just a bus. It's actually not working for us, so I'm not going to use it anymore. 

So that's that's why it's really hard to put a pulse on the trends and like, okay, this is my trend. It's like it's like the Bitcoin era, right? So we're talking about Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin. All of a sudden, there's all these other coins in the market and now Bitcoin. No one's talking about Bitcoin as much as they used to, because we started seeing all these scams coming up. Billionaires, you know picking things and you know what I mean. So, yeah, the real trend will still remain in the form of the fundamentals. We have a need for technology, we have a need for processes, we have a need for people, and I think everything will evolve around these things until they find a way to replace humans. 

0:30:39 - Mehmet
Yeah, 100%. And this is back again to the same thing you and me were talking about like a couple of minutes back, about what are you trying to do with the technology? Because technology always, you know, was a mean for us to get things done better, and I always, you know, for me, you know, started the in the consultancy career. I would say, I put it this way, like is it saving me money, Is it making me do things faster, Is it allowed me to increase the revenue of the company or is it allowed me to avoid or reduce possible loss due to a risk or whatever? If it's not within this framework and I didn't invent this framework like this is like the metrics of any company, right? So it's about loss and profit and loss, and you know about revenues and time and location of resources. So, anyway, if it's not within this, you know, I say you know what like it's good to have, like it's a fancy thing. It's like you, you know, of course you need a car to go to war, but you know, buying the luxury car it's like good to have, right, you don't have to buy the luxury car to go to work, Right? So, actually, even maybe if the train station is close to your home, maybe it's better idea to go and take the train Right. So this is the way I always love to look at the things. It's not I'm saying that technology is not cool. I'm sure 100%, and especially in my opinion on, you know, AI and generative AI. It has a lot of potential to solve real problems. But to your point funny enough, because you mentioned the cloud I had a discussion, I think one year ago, with someone and said you know, like when this cloud thing was coming, everyone had the formal way you mentioned also at the beginning. 

And then what happened? You know, they didn't understand actually why they moved to the cloud. Because the promise was you go to the cloud, you save money. You know like this was, and actually it was not to save money, it's actually to be more agile. And they were. People were sold wrongfully on the idea that, hey, you will close your data center. You have, you don't have to buy hardware and you know, maintain data centers, and this is the year ROI or TCO. And then they figured out it's not actually the case, because cloud actually it's not cheap and you have now to pay for the hyperscales. But if you don't have this necessity for agility to, for example, you always, for example, doing development and you need to be fast. You cannot wait a server to come and you need something to come on the spot and you need to be geographically also independent. Yeah, cloud makes sense. So, to your point, I think. I think this is very on the spot, yeah, please. 

0:33:44 - Anupam
One thing that I would add to that is fundamentally, people think of cloud as something something distant, something magical, and I, in my view, it's basically an outsourced server farm. Really, that's, that's all you have done. You've kind of gotten rid of your own server infrastructure and you outsourced your data maintenance to somebody else, and that company is a big company and they've got multiple server farms all over the globe and they can probably provide you with the right amount of security, pricing, hopefully, and I mean there are the features that are the benefits of having it outsourced, but end of the day, it's like a server farm on the planet. You're not talking about something in the cloud, really, you're not talking about the look up. I'm like what are you doing? It's, it's, it's a server from somewhere on the planet, somewhere. 

0:34:36 - Mehmet
And, by the way, funny enough, people think it's a new concept I was mentioning to One of my guests the other day is actually, you know, the idea of having, you know, just using something central which you cannot see. It was in the mainframe era, right? So so people used to use terminals and we didn't use to see I'm not not my generation, probably people are talking for me but I mean, you know, like we've seen, like videos, you have these massive, huge computers sitting in giant rooms and people used to have all the keyboard and monitors and this was sort of cloud, if you want so. Anyway, I'm like one thing you know, as we're coming close to an end, so I want to ask you about you know, your leadership philosophy, especially in tech, and if you can share with me some key lessons you have learned about leading tech teams efficiently, and what are your advices for aspiring, you know, technology professionals who are aiming to become leaders in this field? 

0:35:50 - Anupam
One of the things that I try to do is understand my team members at two levels at a personal level and at an intellectual level. That allows me to understand what kind of individuals they are, what they like, what they don't like and other things in between, and also it allows me to assess their technical capabilities, how good they are in specific domains. So if a project comes along, I know which team members are going to be most effective given their personality and given their knowledge of a particular technological domain. Having these skill sets handy, plus coupled with my own skill sets, which I'm a very hands-on leader, I don't believe in just simple delegation. I roll up my sleeves and get involved. So if there is an architectural discussion happening, even if I don't understand the technology, basically I'll sit there so I can understand the technology. That's some learning for me, and once I've learned it becomes a lot easier for me to have a more constructive dialogue with the team members. So when I understand something from an overall viewpoint, making decisions become easier. I understand for senior leadership it might not be feasible because they're looking at you know thousands of people, which isn't my remit, but when you're dealing at a team level it's a lot easier to basically deep dive into these specifics so you can manage them a lot better. 

One exercise I used to do with my team, especially when I thought they were getting a bit monotonous and bored I actually one exercise I would like to mention here is I called them into a teleconference and I would be like, okay, sorry, team's meeting. And I'll say, guys, today we are just going to talk about one thing that you like, physical thing that you like, show it to us and tell us the story behind it. And that brought out so many good conversations. And then what that basically did was it brought out things about that individual that you didn't know before, and not just me. The entire team got to know them better. So there was a massive team building component involved in that. 

And once you understand each other better, the bonding between each other becomes far greater and the finger pointing disappears and people start to trust each other much more. Productivity goes up. And then one good thing I mean one really good thing came out of. It was people start to help each other. For example, if someone's actually struggling with the task, others would put their hand up and say, hey, don't worry, I'll help you out. 

And all of a sudden your entire team is working like one micro-organism and it's just delivering the output that you want and it becomes so productive it just starts to hum along itself and you don't have to get involved. And my philosophy usually is to get any team to that level where it's humming along and then ensure that in the process you develop more leaders. And my philosophy is I've stuck to the basics like my first job was to get rid of my job in HP, so that's exactly what I do in every role. So I go in there and make the team efficient enough so they don't need me anymore. So that's basically it. I think that's the basic I stick to. 

0:39:26 - Mehmet
That's great insight and advice from you and it resonated a lot with also like when I reflect on my own career as well. So 100% on this, finally, where people can find more about you. 

0:39:46 - Anupam
I'm on LinkedIn. Obviously the link can be shared with people. I've got a website acute servicescom and if someone wants to call us, they have the number on the website. They can always call the 1300 number and it will be picked up by one of the team members. Usually I try to pick up the sales calls if possible, but if not, they can always leave as a voice message with their number and we'll get back to them. 

0:40:14 - Mehmet
Sure sure. 

I will make sure that the links you just mentioned are in the show notes of this episode. I really enjoyed this discussion because we share a lot from career perspective also as well. I like your mindset also. We need more people like yourself, honestly speaking, and again, it's not about just trying to criticize things, it's about really and we talked about being business-centric, customer-centric Actually give the client what really they want, not only what we think is good for them or because we're going to make some money and just throw this solution in front of them. And then they will struggle and, believe me and I'm talking here to everyone who's in the consultancy or about to be in the consultancy maybe you can do short wins, but on the long run, on the long term, what will stay is the authenticity and business-centricity, customer-centricity that you show to your customer. And this is why you know, anupam I know you have two decades of this and you have repeating customers and same for me. You know, even if I change companies, I know that when I call someone or they call me, they trust me and, of course, I trust them also as well. So this is very important and again, thank you for being here today, anupam. I really appreciate the time and this is for the audience. 

If you are first time here and you know you discovered this podcast by chance or someone told you about it. I hope you enjoyed. Please subscribe and follow us and share it also with your friends and colleagues, and if you are one of our followers and fans, thank you very much for your support and thank you very much for all. You know the feedback that you write to me. I read them all. I'm listening to your complaints, even to your suggestions, so please let them come in. And again, thank you very much for tuning in. We'll meet again in an episode very soon. Thank you, bye-bye. 

0:42:26 - Anupam
Thank you.