Podcast EP 3 | Can Field Data Management Streamline Operations, Compliance, and Safety On-Field? Ft. Max Echeverria, Founder and CEO, Eskuad

Then you need to find the best way to solve it and it’s not necessarily the first idea you have. That can be reshaped with the brains of the crowd, basically. Your customers, friends, family, everybody bringing feedback to you so you can reshape your idea.

I would say another component is being resilient. When you start in social media, you see like, yeah, I built this and we’re millionaires now, whatever. But it’s not the typical road that a founder follows.

It’s ups and downs, basically a roller coaster. I’ve heard from friends and I’ve passed through that as well a couple of times, that sometimes you’re about to get financially broken as a company and then you suddenly close a huge deal that grows your business 10 times or the other way around. Like you’re about to close and then the closing stage of the deal fails.

So, you need to be ready for those changes in your path. And I would say being resilient is one of the best skills you can build.

Host: That’s very inspiring. So, founding a field data management platform is quite a unique idea. What inspired you to venture into the sector, and what industry gaps did you identify before entering this venture?

Max: Yeah, I mean, it was organically that I got into the field because my dad, who is now the head of revenue at our company, he worked in telecom since I was, I mean, since he finished his school years in the 80s. So, he started running field operations for telecom, starting from being with technicians connecting cover lines as an engineer back in the 80s, and then to running all the field operations in my native country, Chile, for one of the biggest companies. And basically, when I was growing up, a day in the job, at your dad’s job, was in the field, maybe in like a rural road with a white helmet and with a lot of guys connecting stuff in the field and finding for solutions under the weather, basically where it could be raining and you need to be there anyways.

So, when I was growing up, I saw my dad working with them in the field without the right tools because it didn’t exist back in the 90s when I was growing up and the 2000s. And then I did my internship at a copper mine pit, which is the biggest private health copper mining operation in the world. And I was there and they have a lot of money.

They have all the resources, but the technologies that we use in the field didn’t work well. So, I started thinking, I mean, it is in telecom. I saw it in mining.

And then a customer, our first customer, was a forester company that experienced the same problem. I have a lot of people in the field. We need to gather data for different purposes, safety, compliance, operations, streamlining the operations and all of those things.

And we’re running on pen and paper and then looking for signal or like Internet with a cable like Ethernet and transcribing all of the paper-based notes into forms, digital forms, whatever they have or Excel spreadsheets, and then creating the different reports for the different shareholders, stockholders, like, well, the interested parties of my operation. And we, myself and David, one of my Co-Founders, we noticed that if this is happening to the biggest forester company in Chile, which is actually top five in the world, it happened to the biggest mining operation in copper in the world as well. And it happened to my dad in the field, in telecom, in one of the biggest telecommunications companies also in the world.

It’s a Spain owned company that ran in all the Americas as well. It is like probably nobody has solved it the way it needs to operate for the workers in the field. Probably it works for the management, but not for the people in the field.

So that’s how we got involved. And we started digging and understanding why that’s how we got involved with working in this field, because it affected me, my family, my friends.

Host: So, how do you think the technological shift has contributed to streamline the workflow in different industries? Like which innovations have fascinated you the most so far?

Max: I mean, first of all, I’ve always been, I mean, I’m an industrial engineer, but I’ve always been a tech geek since I was a kid growing up. I learned how to code and build electronic things and stuff. So, it has impressed me the most lately.

I mean, not lately, but in the last 10 years has been, first of all, the easiness of access to provide the product to people, which is the platforms that are available through Android and iOS. For example, the Play Store and the App Store is like a huge channel. Then people take that for granted.

But back in 2009 or 2008, when it wasn’t as spread, it wasn’t that easy to create a product that everybody can use. So that’s one of the things that shaped the, like reshaped the industry in the last 15, 20 years. The other thing is the ubiquitousness, like how ubiquitous is the internet access now?

Despite it’s still unreliable in the rural areas where we serve, you can use things like Starlink to provide internet and the satellite access to the internet and the new software and hardware designs that allow it to use a regular phone with satellite access to the internet. That’s revolutionary. And our product is well designed to actually get the most out of it.

So, you can still run without draining your battery despite you are connected to those satellites, which takes more battery out of your phone. So basically, that’s one of the things. And the other thing I like a lot, but it’s a little deeper, the way iPhones find each other when you lose your iPhone is basically there’s a network between all the phones that people is not aware, but it’s on the terms and conditions.

So basically, the phones are connected to each other and that allows you to find your phone regardless of internet service quality. So those networks that are constantly moving is something that I like a lot. And we’re taking advantage of all those things to create our product, to serve our customers.

So that’s why I like them a lot. And it also it provides us with access to the world to provide the product from originally from two guys from the south of Chile built this and now we have a company.

Host: Personally, the technology that you mentioned, like how the phones are connected, has helped me in real life. When I lost my phone and because of that, I was able to find it, like track it.

Max: Yeah. So, I like it.

Host: It’s quite helpful. So, moving on, do you think customer satisfaction and loyalty contribute to a business’s progression? And if so, how do you prioritize customers’ needs to preserve success?

Max: We prioritize that at the top. Actually, most of the things we develop are either coming from our customers’ ideas and then we reshape them into something that we see could potentially serve their need because they typically come with an idea based on what they know. Maybe they know this part of the world and we know this other part.

So, putting together their needs with their idea of how to solve it, plus what we know on this other end, can create a new version of the solution for their need. So typically, what we prioritize is their need and the root of that need. Like, why do you need this?

So, we typically have a lot of meetings and we talk a lot with our customers to fuel that innovation at our company. And that actually is one of the things we weigh when we prioritize what we’re going to build next. So, within our roadmap, we have a lot of weight for customer needs.

There’s something like somewhat related to technical things that we need or we must do because iOS is mandating that. But besides of those things, typically we prioritize what the customers need first. And I believe 100% that customer loyalty is key for business growth because imagine you have a bucket, like typically it’s a typical example of companies growing.

When you fundraise, you get money, you start growing your business and you hire people. And typically, those efforts go to sales because you need to grow your revenue so you can show that growth to your customers and your investors and all the people, the stakeholders, the people involved. And so, if you have a leaky bucket, which is a customer, like a company with no customer loyalty because you’re bringing new customers, but they’re leaving, then your efforts are, part of them are wasted, but you’re not efficient.

So, you can grow a lot. But after you grew, you provide them with a product or a service that they don’t appreciate much. And then they leave.

And that’s called churn. And if they churn, basically you’re not growing healthy in a healthy way. So, what we try to do originally was to have a really good product that stick to their processes.

So, they’re super happy with the product. They like it. And because they like it, they try it and then it sticks to their process because they’re using it.

And whenever somebody else tells them, hey, we need to change to this other product, they will defend us and that will prevent churn. And if we prevent churn, all the efforts we do in sales are staying in the bucket of new customers instead of leaving because they’re not happy with the product. And if they’re super loyal, even if you fail, but you were there, you were always listening to them, you were trying to help them, you were part of their team instead of just leaving.

They’re going to tell you, hey, I’m thinking about leaving because of X, Y and Z. Can we do something about it? And that’s the loyalty.

Like if you build the relationship with them, they will tell you that you’re failing instead of just leaving. And if they tell you you’re failing, you need to try to do something about it. But just having the chance to do something is super valuable because sometimes they just leave and you don’t know why.

Host: One hundred percent. So, as we’re aware, Eskuad pays significant attention to data privacy and security. So, how does the firm stay compliant with the latest privacy policies and practices while building the unbreakable security framework?

Max: I mean, what we do is that we try to stay compliant with the best standards. So, the way we operate, the way we set up processes, everything is under that umbrella of some certifications. In our case, we are compliant with SOC 2, Type 1 and Type 2, but we’re also trying to pursue others.

So, we as a company, we have designed the processes and the team to operate in like the most safety way possible. On top of that, we try to use systems that are intrinsically safe or as safe as possible because we’re working with big vendors that take care of the storage security, for example. So, for example, we partner with Google or Amazon for storage.

And then on top of all of that, we also try to keep the best standards for the syncing algorithms and these end-to-end encryptions and all of those basically features of cybersecurity to enable that to happen. And then on top of that, we build the product as flexible as we can. So, on top of all that design, we try to build a super flexible product.

And because the design of our product is super flexible by design, it is a tool that customers can customize themselves. So that allows us to stay compliant with the new versions of their processes, which could be related to auditable process that are part of a certification or part of compliance with the government. So, whenever something changed there, they can change it immediately on Eskuad.

And behind that UI, like the user interface they operate, is all the things that I mentioned before, like the foundations of Eskuad are compliant with the standard of cybersecurity that we pursue. And on top of that, we have a flexible solution that they can reshape as quickly as they can.

Host: So, Max, in your opinion, how have traditional data collection and management tactics transformed over the years? Like what are some of the key characteristics of modern-day data management?

Max: I mean, originally it was a lot of siloed data stored in paper. So, think of like stacks of paper that somebody filled out in the field, like form for procedure A, form for procedure B, form for safety standards, form for whatever. So, you have a lot of them.

And every time a person goes to the field, they needed to comply with those, get the signatures of the team or like take pictures and then go back to the office and transcribe that into the actual informational pieces that they need to share. And that has been performed probably since the nineties when like Corel WordPerfect appeared and you can start creating your own reports on computers. And then it evolved to some digitization in the 2000s, where you can start to input data directly into a form in some kind of digital technology.

And then in the 2010s, it started to evolve with the appearance and spreading of the smartphones. So, smartphones allowed you to have access to the digital forms in your palm everywhere. But then it started to evolve into some other stuff.

And if you go the growth, if you go with the growth, you will see that people in the field was trying to be forced into digitization. But without the actual really good technologies, they need to go back to their backup system, which is the pen and paper. So even in the 2000s, with the access to the iPhones and the smartphones like the Android devices or Huawei’s and stuff, they still have their notepad on their pocket where they take notes because they don’t trust in the solution.

And that’s where Eskuad came in. Like we created Eskuad to like fill that gap of trust between the digital solutions that they were trying to, they were enforced to use, they were trying to use into actually using something that they rely on and then it allows them to do the rest. So basically, what I’ve been seeing is that from siloed data sets on paper, they were trying to create, eliminate the silos and starting, start sharing the information to streamline the operation.

And that happened at management level for sure, because when you have the data transcribing to some digital solution, it automatically spreads. So, all of the reporting and all of that happened probably since 2000s. But I would say the last frontier in that transformation is getting data reliably from the field.

And that’s where we try to play with Eskuad and to connect with the existing systems that they’re already there and people used to use.

Host: So why is turning towards sustainability important for businesses nowadays? Like what advantages do sustainable approaches offer?

Max: I mean, my take, my personal take is that sustainability must be core because even if you’re getting a lot of money by selling a product now, if you are not sustainable in your operation, either the society on your neighborhood is going to get angry at some point and going to force you to stop operating or the environment won’t provide you with your whatever materials you’re using. If it’s forestry products, if you don’t let them grow at some point, you’re going to run out of trees to produce as much and then you will be sourcing from somewhere else at a pricey cost. And that’s a renewable.

If you go with non-renewables like minerals or others, like the story is worst. So, like by definition, a business to be sustainable and to be profitable in the long term, not only like short term today, but even like in two years or maybe 10 years from now or even more, you need to be sustainable. So, it provides you with an advantage if you operate that way, because you know that in the future you can still operate while others are not operating well because they have issues with society or environment.

On top of that, there is clear benefits and incentives right now. So, for example, if you’re certified with a certification that says that you’re approving certification that is validated by the market, like the ones you can see on like burgers, like cardboard packages or like soda cans and stuff, you see stamps on the back. Those stamps are typically certifications that are approved or at least validated by the market.

And those certifications, if you’re producing the raw material, give you a prime. So if you are compliant with, let’s say, FSC or SFI or in forestry or if you’re running a zero damage operation in mining and you can prove it, either your product is sold first than the rest, like the market will buy yours first if it’s at the same price or if it’s enough demand and not enough offer, you can get a prime on your product, which happens with forestry products. For example, you can sell logs at three dollars more per ton if you’re certified and you’re selling to a European company that values that certified product.

So basically, there’s incentives like monetary incentives today to either sell first or sell at a prime if you’re compliant. And on top of that, you avoid fines, you avoid issues with the government. So, there’s a lot of benefits if you are sustainable in your operation.

And what we try to do with Eskuad is to make it easy for your operational team in the field to help you comply with that. So, they don’t need to do three forms on top of what they do. They just do one and we help them collect and create all the other reports they need to create manually.

And that saves them time, which allows you to streamline your operation. But on top of that, it allows you to comply with the different things you need to comply to be more sustainable or at least to be able to steward that your operation is as sustainable as possible.

Host: So, lastly, how will you inspire young minds with unique ideas? Like what should they consider while starting their entrepreneur journey?

Max: That’s the question I’m always complicated to answer because I don’t know. I would say that humans, like people by definition, don’t want to leave having a problem, whatever the problem is. So, you try to find solutions.

So, I would say the thing that change the way you solve the problems is probably the way you think about how big the problems are, how important they are and if they affect you as much to do something about it. So, when you decide to do something, it could be a simple problem. But if you start thinking of like how many people face that problem, that’s when you start thinking of, oh, maybe there’s a market for this.

If you think this is super complicated, it affected that person too much. If it causes a huge pain, even if it’s not as many people, it can be a market for that as well, because then you have not as many people, but like they’re willing, really willing to pay for the solution. So, if you start thinking of how the problems you solve affect other people, like being empathetic, which I would say it’s another skill for an entrepreneur.

If you start thinking of how it affects others, then you automatically start thinking on like, oh, this is bigger than I expected. Maybe we can pursue this. And the other change I would say in the mindset is if you’re skilled enough to be paid to do something for somebody is because you’re making them more money than what you’re getting paid for, because that’s how companies operate.

So even if you’re a young person, not even a professional, like you’re like a high school and people is willing to pay you something, let’s say a hundred, whatever monetary coin we use, if they’re paying you a hundred, it’s probably because you’re producing at least 150. So, if you do it by yourself, you can get the 150 for yourself. So, and if you are good enough to lead a team at a company, you’re probably good enough to lead your own team.

So, if you’re thinking of being an employee and because you’re going to have security and all of that, probably you can do that. But also, if you’re good enough to be employed and be paid for that employment, then you’re good enough to start your own small team and start leading it and taking all the revenue for you and reinvest it to grow your business. So, I would say the same skill set for being an employee are the basic components of being a good entrepreneur.

I don’t think entrepreneurship is for lazy people, which is what I thought when I was back in the university. I was one of the best students in my class and typically I saw the entrepreneurs as like people that couldn’t get employed. But then when I started building my own stuff, I noticed that I was more, because I was a good student and I was employable, I was also responsible, like organized and that those are skills that help you run a business that can grow.

You can always build something out of an idea and like out of effort and grinding and all of that, but it can take you so long. And then if you’re organized, if you’re responsible, if you’re being empathetic, if you’re listening to your customers, then you can bring that effort to last longer and to build bigger. So, I would say it’s the same skill set.

Just give it a try. The worst can happen. You’ll learn and then you can get employed again anyways, because you will learn skill sets that other employees don’t have.

Host: That’s a golden advice. Thank you so much. So, we come to an end.

Thank you so much, Max, for sharing your journey, expertise and incredible insights with us. It’s been truly inspiring to learn about Eskuad’s mission and your views on entrepreneurship, innovation and sustainability. So once again, thank you so much.

Max: No, thank you for having me here. It’s always good to be able to share ideas and spread the word.

Host: To our audiences, thank you for joining us today. I’m your host, Sayali, signing off. See you soon in the next episode of ExtraMile by YourTechDiet, where we’re bringing you another extraordinary leader sharing their vision and knowledge. So please stay tuned.