Danny serves as Vice President of Client Development at ThreeWill. His primary responsibilities are to make sure that we are building partnerships with the right clients and getting out the message about how we can help clients.
Tommy serves as the President at ThreeWill. In this role, he works with his leadership team to hire the best people, find the right business opportunities, and ensure that ThreeWill delivers for our clients on projects.
Find this Podcast “ThreeWill Milestones from the Last 15 Years” on the ThreeWill Soundcloud, Stitcher, and iTunes.
Transcript
| Danny Ryan: | Hello this is Danny Ryan, welcome to the ThreeWill Podcast. This morning we’ve got 2 other people here in the room with me. We’ve got the usual Tommy Ryan here with me. Hey Tommy.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Good morning Danny.
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| Danny Ryan: | How are you doing?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Doing well.
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| Danny Ryan: | Awesome, awesome.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Doing very well.
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| Danny Ryan: | Very good, glad to have you back. We want to say congratulations on your 25 year anniversary to Linda.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Wedding anniversary, that’s huge.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Coming straight from the mountains.
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| Danny Ryan: | You have a good time?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. Yeah. A good day of hiking and relaxing. Actually the first time I probably read a hardback book in years.
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| Danny Ryan: | Really? What did you read?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Marcus Aurelius, which is a stoic. Back in, let’s see, 1580 period. Interesting person, basically it’s reflecting on his diary, and they’re dissecting that and trying to give you context to it. There’s really some deep thoughts.
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| Danny Ryan: | Nice.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Really good reading for being up in the mountains.
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| Danny Ryan: | Did someone recommend this to you? How did you run into that book?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Linda’s read and I’ve heard about it.
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| Danny Ryan: | Okay.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I’ve heard other people reference it so I’ve always been curious about reading it. I cracked that open.
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| Danny Ryan: | That lead to some good conversations with Linda hopefully too since she’s read it as well.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. We had some conversations around that. Actually, we’re probably going to have a blog post coming.
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| Danny Ryan: | I like it. I like it even better.
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| Tommy Ryan: | We were talking about, after 25 years what advice would we give to our children about a strong marriage. Things that we think that we didn’t really know when we got married, to say, “This are the things that we’ve learned over the past 25 years.”
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| Danny Ryan: | That’s awesome. Can’t wait to read that.
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| Tommy Ryan: | We’ve got a joint blog post that we’re going to do together.
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| Danny Ryan: | Talking about your children we have Austin Ryan here in the room with me. Austin is our new marketing intern. I haven’t had a marketing intern up to this point, so you’re in a new ground here for me. Welcome to the ThreeWill team Austin.
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| Austin Ryan: | Thanks for having me.
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| Danny Ryan: | Absolutely. Absolutely.
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| Austin Ryan: | I’m excited to learn.
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| Danny Ryan: | Absolutely. That’s where it leads to, today’s conversation, which maybe before I jump into that conversation let me see the socks.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Don’t forget the socks.
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| Danny Ryan: | Oh my goodness, folks …
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| Tommy Ryan: | …yellow, a little orange, some stripes. It’s all there.
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| Danny Ryan: | He has got some … Yes. Where did you get those from?
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| Tommy Ryan: | These? Gosh, I think Banana Republic.
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| Danny Ryan: | Banana Re- Nice. Nice, and I showed you earlier …
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s my standard go-to.
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| Danny Ryan: | I showed you earlier … Yeah you need a pair of handdown socks. I have my one pair of cool socks, and I want to start my MailChimp socks, representing MailChimp out of Atlanta Georgia, and you said you saw them at Ponce City market.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t see their office, but Alex was saying that’s where their office is.
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| Danny Ryan: | Very nice. If anyone from MailChimp is listening, Alex Ryan would love an internship there.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Just working that angle. Today’s topic, we have Austin, earlier this week, just to give you a little of background, Austin’s been working on some of the SEO and taking a look at our website. He made the critical mistake of saying, “Why don’t we have a Wikipedia page for ThreeWill.” I said, “That’s nice. I don’t know, why don’t we have a ThreeWill page for Wikipedia? Why don’t you go ahead and go make that page for us Austin.” He’s going to learn over the course of this summer to complain about nothing. Everything’s going to be great, he’s going to be like, “Dan you’re a marketing genius.” He’ll learn this over the course of the internship, that anything that he sees as a problem becomes his problem.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s an opportunity.
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| Danny Ryan: | It’s an opportunity.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s an opportunity.
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| Danny Ryan: | Absolutely. What he was trying to do was to, and it’s more difficult than you would expect it to be, which is to put out factual information on Wikipedia, because everything on Wikipedia is factual, but you’re trying your best to provide third party references to facts that you have on Wikipedia. That leads to this conversation which is, what are the milestones, what do you see Tommy as being some of the milestones of ThreeWill? The obvious one starting out with founded in 2001. Maybe let’s talk through what things do you think Austin should have as milestones of the company?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Even to go back before the founding, I think the idea of ThreeWill came when you came to visit up in Maryland. I think we started getting an idea of, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a business together. We were seeing the internet becoming a viable place for commerce and people to do business. That was I think a high interest of ours to explore in that area. We ended up going to a company together called, at the time Omni Technologies. We said, “Let’s try working together to see if we’re work compatible to start a business,” having that test bed of what’s project work like together at a company doing business in the internet age. That was the beginning thoughts of ThreeWill. Even when I went in and interviewed with ThreeWill with Wayne Kellum, the president, I mentioned that our goal is to start a business together one day. He said, “That’s great. I hope you never get to that point because I’d love for you to stay here but that’s great. That’s a great goal to have.”
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| We had that as a starting point of it. We poured ourselves into that experience at Extreme Logic, which what it was called after Omni Technologies, and we had several projects together. Then I think meeting at Starbucks and taking walks was how we formed that company. I think it wasn’t one of those things that’s, start a company and the next day we quit our jobs. We ended up taking walks and saying, “What’s important about starting a company?” Why would we want to do that?
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| Danny Ryan: | We were highly caffeinated and had lots of oxygen in our systems.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s right.
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| Danny Ryan: | We had lots of very … Where great things start typically are on a good walk, going out and letting your mind get free a little bit and talk about what do you want to create, that’s where things are created.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right, right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I don’t know if … There’s not going to be milestones that you reference on the Wikipedia but I think that’s key and important for a company, is what’s the origin of it? What’s that reason? What’s that purpose?
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Tommy Ryan: | The thing, I know we don’t as much today but I’ve actually been thinking about it recently, is this whole turning the art of software development into a science. I think we saw a lot of things that were a lot of mistakes and things that you could from and improve, versus just going on to the next thing. I think that’s made SharePoint sticky with us, because we wanted to hone and craft that and make it better and better. The more time you spend with a technology, the more you can hone in on that and turn it more into a science. But I think at the end of the day the work that we do is a balance of art and science. I don’t think you can turn it totally into a science because of the people interaction and the high interpersonal skill that it takes to be a consultant to help people that have problems and turn those into solutions.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, and I know, and this is great, this is a bit of talking about what the ThreeWill story is, what’s the background behind the company itself, which is great. I think we could do a whole separate podcast on where the whole concept of the ThreeWill name came from, which is people, process, technology and really the combination of those 3 things, which is sort of again being highly caffeinated, thinking that that was what we wanted to focus in on, a very specific technology, a very specific process that we’re using, and then looking for people with a specific, inside the culture, with a specific set of values that we had out on website. We thought that that was a combination, the combination of those 3 things is what we were trying to start out with as a company. Absolutely. Founding the company, tell me what happened in 2001, a little bit more context on how did this whole things go down?
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| Tommy Ryan: | In 2001 when we started the company we had a non compete with Extreme Logic, so for that period of time we could not do the consulting work in the Atlanta area, so we ended up doing training and doing training really all over the world. We signed up with some of the national training providers and since we wrote a book on ASP.NET and C#, that was the up and coming hot thing that needed to be in the form of training to a lot of organizations. That brought us all over the US and brought us all over the world. I know we went together to do a trainer in Amsterdam. You ended doing a world tour, I think it was on Windows Server.
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| Danny Ryan: | It was Windows Server and ASP.NET.
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| Tommy Ryan: | … technologies. You came back and I gave you a shirt that showed your world tour dates on the back.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I think that first year was going around and evangelizing ASP.NET and web technology, which was an interesting period because we got into business together really to do the consulting, so that was a little bit of a holding pattern for us, that I think we see value in training. We have attempted to try to integrate some of that back into our business but it’s very hard, it’s a different day and age when it comes to training the people in a classroom and coming in as a trainer. Those are not common ways of learning technology, you see things like Pluralsight and that’s becoming more the main stream way of doing that. That was the first year, and then some of our first work, working with a neighbor.
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| My next door neighbor, where we were building a website for them with them working in the home default loans, that needed to have some assistance in getting people into a house that they could actually afford and save. They were called Home Savers and they were trying to keep people in their houses by refinancing and finding ways to allow them to make it affordable. Then also another personal connection, this is one of the things you learn in business, that it is all about relationships. One of our close relationships is with our brother Bobby at ApolloMD. At ApolloMD I think we did really nice consulting work there initially, learned a lot of lessons on how to present.
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| Tommy Ryan: | We learned how to avoid sticker shock. I think we ran into a sticker shock problem there when we designed something very … Probably appropriate we didn’t lead them down the path to understand how we got there. That work was with SharePoint. It wasn’t intentional but it happened to be our first enterprise set of work.
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| Danny Ryan: | It was team services, was it, what was it called? What was it?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, yeah. SharePoint Team Services.
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| Danny Ryan: | I think it was team ser- Yeah, STS.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I guess you would it was SharePoint 2001, but it was that free version and it allowed them to have a shared calendar, shared documents. We created a scheduling calendar and we did some customizations to it to allow them to schedule physicians.
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| Danny Ryan: | This is great, because I don’t know if I shared this with you but next week I’m going over to Kennesaw to do a presentation on family businesses, what it’s like to run a family business. This is giving me some really good pearls here because I think some of this, what you’re talking about, I’m putting together in my mind the list of some of the things that we’ve learned. First one being, work together first in a low risk way, which is what we need with working at Extreme Logic. Second one would be have a plan B, which was our doing the training instead of consulting work. Third one I’m thinking, your relationships, how important they are for finding your initial business. In order for you to get a business up and running your personal relationships can end up translating into the first set of work that you end up getting as a new business. Keep going, keep going, you’re giving me some great material here. What’s next? What’s next from here?
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| Tommy Ryan: | We ended up doing a lot of web-based development. Along the way, a prominent figure in our ThreeWill background was Nick Levis. Nick Levis was someone that we were consulting with that worked at Extreme Logic. We met him in some project work that we had at Extreme logic and then for the company Ernst & Young. At Ernst & Young I think he valued our approach to how we helped that project. We got stuck through the project, through the roughest parts of the project, and formed a relationship that he was willing to help us set out details of our business plan and inspecting, adapting along the way. We eventually did some work at Ernst & Young, it might have been 3 years later. We’ll have to go look it at the actual date where our first project was there. Quite a bit of work at Ernst & Young, it was really our client that gave us the left to start hiring other people.
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| Danny Ryan: | That’s another great point; you have to almost have an anchor client. You have to have someone who gets you from being the 2 founders, or the however many founders to the point in which you can start to hire new people.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right, right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Like it or not, at least for us it was one client often is one where you’re getting a lot of multiple work from, which allows for you to focus in on doing some internal improvements of hiring folks and building out the team.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right, right. That was, I think, a critical milestone for us. Then BellSouth was actually a critical milestone for us. I think that got us into the world of SharePoint. That, working with SharePoint 2003 and building something that was going to be compatible to the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2007. That was around the 2006 time frame. Between Ernst & Young and BellSouth there was a numerous number of projects that we did. Did a lot of stuff helping Microsoft consulting services, some of the training that we did I think led into a certain level of respect that we knew that space of ASP.NET and did a variety of number of projects.
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| Groove is one thing to note, in between SharePoint, and starting with our first project at Ernst & Young we did a couple large group projects. Those group projects pointed to our passion for collaborative technology. It was something about the excitement of seeing when people work together in software, how that software lights up and start encouraging behavior to do more together as a team, and this whole work together better concept I think came out of that collaboration, was the type of applications we gravitated to.
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| Danny Ryan: | We didn’t know that from the beginning. I don’t think we started the company thinking about, work together better. I think we started the company saying, “How can we turn the art of software development into a science, trying to be very engineering mentality towards software, where software seemed a little bit loosey goosey, you just did whatever, and there was a little bit of structure around the language of software development, but the whole process side seemed like it needed a lot of improvement over time. It’s been a passion of ours as we evolved in our thought process around what is the appropriate methodology.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I think that as well since your background is chemical engineering, mine’s industrial engineering, that’s had a big influence on this culture, which is focusing in on problem … We’re very problem solving type of people. We want to take on the big problems and we want to be there for folks to present solutions. We’re not really big into just talking about things or making more problems, but we are really interested in how do we define … I think a part of our process is defining what we’re going to do and how we’re going to prove we actually do that. I think it’s very core to who we are as a company, and a part of our culture.
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| Danny Ryan: | I remember you saying that, being consultative. One of the things that really connected with me and gave me of satisfaction in the area of software development was when we were doing the project for Yellow Truck. I remember facing that challenge of not getting someone’s attention to make a decision, and coming up with alternatives and suggestions of what is the best path, but being open to the alternative path.
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| Remembering, through email conversations and phone conversations, where I was developing that skill and it felt good, to be able to help people get out of that being stuck, where they feel overwhelmed with the problem in front of them, they don’t know exactly what path to take. Being that person that’s blazing the trail for them, taking into consideration what are they trying to accomplish, and then being braved enough to move forward with problem and adapt to what you learn along the way, I think that’s why Agile was so important to us. We discovered Agile as a methodology, is that ability of you don’t know everything but be brave enough to take the next step as informed as you can can be, and then adapt to what you learn along the way.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I think that’s a good milestone for us, because you and I looked at different what we were going to say our process is, instead of baking our own thing up and saying, “This is the ThreeWill process.” Do you remember when it was?
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| Danny Ryan: | It’s very close to the time of SharePoint.
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| Tommy Ryan: | It was around SharePoint? Okay.
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| Danny Ryan: | It was closely close to that time, if not within a year I would say. We can go back, I think I put something out on Yammer about the date that I went to the training with Pete with Mike Cohn.
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| Tommy Ryan: | That’s a Mike Cohn training, okay.
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| Danny Ryan: | A Mike Cohn training, because that’s when we decided right before that we wanted to get some training to start rolling that out in the organization. We were really big into RUP and RUP just seemed to be too much. Too much education of all the components that go into the Rational Unified Process. As we looked at Agile, Agile looked like a lightweight, very practical way of doing iterative development.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Then we chose … Scrum is a type of Agile.
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| Danny Ryan: | It’s a type of Agile.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Okay.
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| Danny Ryan: | Back then there was XP, there was a number of … Extreme Programming.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Thank you for defining the acronyms.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, yeah. Did concepts like pair programming, and a lot of those things came from that Agile movement. There’s a really good summary of what Agile is with the Agile manifesto, that points about the value of, there are 2 competing things and what do you value more when those things compete against each other.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Now we were starting to do a bunch of work with SharePoint, which we have traditionally either done for … We started doing it with enterprises, building solutions that companies would use inside their organization. Then we started building some of these connectors, tell me a little bit more about that.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. When you get into SharePoint, one of the things that we did, which I’m amazed that we did this because it was one of the things that it was ideally we should do this, and you never get to that ideally you do this. But we went into SharePoint saying, “What can you do out of the box? What can you get from the platform?” We were challenging people to put away Visual Studio for a period of time and understand the platform, so we did that. After a period of time we got into, what were the edges of SharePoint? What were the technically challenging parts of SharePoint?
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| We have very strong app dev minded people here, and they were able to soften those edges with SharePoint and do that very well. We had worked with Groove and we did a lot of the high end technical pieces of extending Groove. Some people in that Groove organization went to Microsoft, and when that happened there was a period of time that Microsoft was trying to say, SharePoint is integrated with other platforms. They were having a conversation with Confluence, I think Steve Balmer, with the president of Atlassian, and coming out of that they were saying, “When we go to this next conference we want to show integration,” I think with both NewsGator and Confluence. Dave Bannon got us connected and said, “These folks at ThreeWill, I know they’re in SharePoint and we did work with them at Groove, and they’re top notch people.”
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| We had that opportunity to go in and build a connector for Atlassian for their Confluence enterprise Wiki product. That turned on I think a high passion within our group. There was something about, we can do really high end development and this form of integration, and be proud about that because it is that turning art into science. You’re trying to package that. Not only are you trying to build it and deploy into one organization, you’re trying to build it and package it so it can be deployed anywhere. We got a kick out of figuring that out and making that happen. That led into I think say a dozen …
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| Tommy Ryan: | A dozen different …
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| Danny Ryan: | A dozen different connectors. That includes connectors … We did … I think the big ones were Jive, when we did Jives connector and work with them to integrate it with SharePoint. In more recent years the work that we did with SalesForce and connecting AppChatter with SharePoint. It’s amazing how that sort of … I think it really did, we like the high end type of product development work. Then that led to, I know within recent years, it’s led to us building some products of our own and trying to say, “Okay, how do we build stuff out for the app exchange? How do we build things out for the office store and for us to have those capabilities?” I think right now we’re not doing a lot of product development work for other companies but I can see that coming back.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Sure.
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| Danny Ryan: | I really could.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah. I think with this next wave of technology, re-engineering that’s going on within the Office platform and some of the recent announcement on the SharePoint framework, I think that’s going to lead to people needing some help to figure that out and do it right the first time.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, yeah. Back to … It sounds like over the course of the years we’re getting more focused in on a specific process that we’re using, we’re getting more focused in on specific technologies that we’re trying to hone in on. As a organization what’s the … How have we grown as an organization? Not just number wise but as through the years how did we grow to be who we are today?
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| Tommy Ryan: | Interesting. I think if you look at it, we’ve been able to let go of some things over time. I traditionally have been involved in the delivery, being hands on, working on projects, leading projects, helping across projects. You were doing mostly the sales aspect of things, other kind of functions, and then we’ve let go of some of the things that we’ve done in the past. Not perfect at this, we continue to strive to find ways to free up, to allow other people to fill those responsibilities. Bruce coming on board and helping with being the VP of delivery, and making sure that that’s going well.
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| Pete with the director of technology, they make sure we’re heading in the right direction technology wise. Everybody’s trying to do that but trying to have … Pete spent a little bit extra time and organize around that. Then the principles that we have in the organization, where they’re helping in a sense sell the things that we do, not in a salesy sense but more in a solution engineering sense, that we probably have depended more on you and myself to get in there and explain how we can do things and get it to a point of it’s signed off as a project, and then delivery comes in. Delivery is starting a lot earlier in that conversation to allow us to talk to the problem as a solution versus trying to sell a project.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, and I think you’re … Over the course of the years it’s been of I’m trying to focus more my efforts more on the marketing upfront, through identifying new clients and at least getting us in the door, and more recently focusing on things like workshops. It’s just stuff that will help us to showcase what we’re able to do on delivery, which you’ve said this so many times, our delivery sells. I say that in a very positive way, it’s like once people can experience what goes on on projects, they’re like, “I want more of this.” For you and I it’s to get out of the way, it’s to try to set it up so that very early on they’re experiencing our delivery process, they’re experiencing what it’s like to have a problem and see it solved, see it worked through and solved by delivery.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Right.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah. What am I missing? I know in the latter years.. we probably could talk for another hour on this subject, but what were some of the other things that you think maybe at a high level milestone wise that as you look at the history of the company … I know on a personal level you actually had cancer about midway through this whole thing as well and were out for a period of time.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, that’s close to the time of deciding on SharePoint, because I remember one of our bigger projects on SharePoint initially was with PowerServe, or …
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| Danny Ryan: | PowerSecure?
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| Tommy Ryan: | PowerSecure.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I remember coming back from treatment at that point, going to one of their sprint reviews. A lot of things happened in that period of time, that was back in 2007 period of time. I’m trying to think of other milestones. I think there’s plenty of getting to a point of having multiple enterprise clients at the same time. One of the biggest challenges in a small business is not to put your whole team on one project or one customer. We’ve learned that lesson, where too much effort in one customer, it feels good when it’s working well and as soon as it takes a left turn it can really hurt.
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| We put a lot of effort in to make sure we’re diversified. I think some of the things that we’ve done around sustainment, which was maybe 3 years ago, maybe closer to 4 to 5 years ago, with AT&T, that was a very key milestone for us to say, “We don’t have to always be doing the new shiny, we can be there to support you over the lifetime of the solution.” That’s where you’re going to get the most value. It’s exciting in that first period but if you don’t keep that application healthy you’re going to lose a lot of that ROI, of that initial investment.
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| If you have the right amount of sustainment, you can really stretch out your dollars and get more bang for your buck if we’re involved in that sustainment of the solution. Then most recently migrations, where that can be looked at as something you’re not creating anything new, and kind of doing that hard work of just moving it from one place to another place. That usually lends itself to problems more than happy people. That’s an area that I think we can start honing in on that science side, of turning the art of software development into a science because that migration piece, of the things that we’re doing, I think we’ve got some strong skills from a technology perspective, to hone in and make that better and better and better each time. I’m seeing it, and we’re going to be amazed 2 years down the road of what we can accomplish from a migration standpoint for very complex migrations.
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| Danny Ryan: | Mm-hmm (affirmative), awesome, awesome. Austin, anything that came up that … I know this helps you out 0, because it’s a lot …
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| Tommy Ryan: | It’s a lot of words, no references.
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| Danny Ryan: | There’s a lot of words, no references. Then the time when we won the number 1 consulting company in the south east, according to Fortune Inc. We didn’t have any of that for you. That would be too easy. The one thing that Austin I have guaranteed that he’s going to learn, he will take away, I got this from one of my Georgia Tech professors, Gus Baird, God rest his soul, he always would say … He passed away when I was taking his class, one of his computer science classes.
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| One of his many quotes was, “Ain’t nothing easy when you’re doing it for real.” He would say, “Everybody thinks when you’re an outsider looking in, you’re like, ‘Why don’t you just create a Wiki page?’. Okay, that’s great. Let’s go do that,” and then you run into there are real things that you have to figure out. I know that’s with starting a small company it sounds easy from the outside but when you get into it there’s a lot of real things that you have to … Day to day decisions that have to be made that are really difficult decisions. I know Tommy, you’ve done a great job with leading this company through the years.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Well thank you.
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| Danny Ryan: | We’re coming up on 15 years, which I think not very many companies are able to reach that point in time. I think one of the things that I’m really proud of is that we’ve kept the original feel of the culture. This is probably another topic for another podcast, but talking about the differences of I think some of the real decisions that we’ve made about staying small and keeping our culture because we wanted to create more of an environment than we’re worried about growing to be a huge consulting company at all. I think we’ve made some tough decisions with that.
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| It’s one of those things where you say, “We’ve reached 15 years, if I looked when I started the company out I had all these grand visions of we’re going to be 100 person company and we’re going to be doing X, Y and Z,” but through the years we’ve made some difficult decisions, and are at a size where I’m proud where we’re showing to work every day. I think the people that we have here are really the type of folks who represent us well as a company. I almost want to talk about that along with creating a life style company as well. I think balance was something that on those long walks that we had at Starbucks and walking around, is saying, “Can we really create an environment where we have a healthy personal life and a healthy professional life and keep balance in our marriages and with our families?” I think we’ve been able to do that over the course of these last 15 year. It’s been tough.
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah, I think I’d love to talk about the topic because it is, I think, the thing I think about the most, is the culture and the whole thing of balance. I want balance, not just for me but I want balance for everyone at ThreeWill. Being able to celebrate 25 years of marriage, to me that’s a accomplishment that I’m very focused in on, as much as the growth of ThreeWill, is the growth of my relationship with my spouse and my family. That, easier said than done. I think there are decisions that you have to make and decide what is success and what is fulfillment in your job. I think as you get older you get a better sense of what that is and can put things in perspective of what’s important and what should you celebrate and what types of goals should you set.
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| Danny Ryan: | Yeah, I think sort of rounding this whole conversation out, there’s a prideful part of me where I wish I could point Austin to fortune.com, to all these external sources which say we’re a success, but in reality it’s a lot of how we’ve defined what our internal success is and what is it that we value around here that has made us what we … It’s more than what the outside world says about us. It’s more of have we created a company, a culture that we’re proud of? You’re not going to have the fortunes of the world writing about that, and that’s okay. But it is something I think you have to let go of that, and say, “You know what, we’re not the biggest company out there but we’ve created something that we can all be proud of.”
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| Tommy Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | Anything else before we wrap this up? I’m sorry Austin, I wish I could have had some better third party places you could go look for stuff, but you’re getting to learn about ThreeWill at least, right?
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| Austin Ryan: | Yeah.
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| Danny Ryan: | That’s one thing. Yeah, I’ll have you join us on some of these other conversations that we have with other folks. I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you pull up a little bit here. Before we wrap this whole thing up, Austin has a tattoo on his arm that says, “Christianity is a relationship.” Give me some background on that.
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| Austin Ryan: | I’ve always wanted a tattoo and even though this is on my forearm where everyone can see, especially being here today with a polo on, it feels a little different in a work environment but it’s something that means a lot to me. I’m okay with other people seeing it, having conversations about it.
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| Danny Ryan: | That’s great. It’s something that you know when you’re talking with other folks that it sets up for you a conversation with them about your relationship with God.
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| Austin Ryan: | Yeah. That’s one of the main things that I wanted from a tattoo, so having it on the forearm is the place I wanted it.
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| Danny Ryan: | Mm-hmm (affirmative), awesome. I am so glad that you’re here with me. I think we’re going to have a good time this summer and look forward to more conversations. You can sit here in the ring with me as we do the other podcast. Thanks for joining me for this. Tommy thank you so much.
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| Tommy Ryan: | You’re welcome.
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| Danny Ryan: | This was one of our longer conversations but that’s fine, some of them can go kind of long. I think it was great to hear from you about some of the milestones of the company. I know we’ve got some topics that we can do as follow up topics to this as well, talking about where the ThreeWill name came from, we’ve mentioned the creating more of a balanced culture, talking about some of that, we’re creating a lifestyle type of culture. We’ve got some good topics we can cover in the upcoming weeks. Look forward to having those conversations as well.
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| Tommy Ryan: | I do too.
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| Danny Ryan: | Awesome. Thank you everybody for joining us. Have a wonderful day. Thank you. Bye bye.
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