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Kaylee Williams: Hey everybody, welcome back. It’s the “Iowa Tech Podcast” and I’m your host, Kaylee Williams. I have a very special guest with me today here in the Jethro’s BBQ Studio, Trevor Bolgers, who is the CEO and founder of Letter B Global Technologies. He’s so much more than that. Trevor is a father of four very active children to his wife Jennifer. He is a Division I football player turned professional football player at, uh, the Jacksonville Jag- Jaguars. For the Jacksonville Jaguars. If my husband is watching this, he’s gonna laugh. I’m terrible with sports. Um, and formerly with the University of Iowa football team. And, um, he is the Corridor Business Records Entrepreneur of the Year. So it’s truly an honor to have you in the studio with me today, Trevor. Thank you for coming in.

Trevor Bowlers: Very honored to be here. It’s exciting

Kaylee Williams: let’s talk a little bit about this journey you’ve been on from professional athlete to entrepreneur to family man. I mean, can you talk a little bit, just broadly kinda give us the quick what is your life and how did you end up getting into entrepreneurship?

Trevor Bowlers: It’s funny ’cause, uh, if you go back to the basics of my life, you would say that it’s one that, um, is possibly impossible, right? Because, um, when I was, when I was growing up, at six years old, my dad took an impossible trip, left for a year, and left us in Guyana, South America. And in a lot of cases, uh, people don’t come back. But my dad came back and got all six of us and brought us to Alberta, Canada, right? And that was one of those things that, like, stuck with me forever, and I saw how hard he worked and my mom worked for us as immigrants, and that work ethic really built on my entrepreneurial spi- spirit, right? ‘Cause their, their hands-on really, like, uh, uh, as far as the energy that they put into raising us really impacted how I see the world, you know? And, uh, then you look at my opportunity to play football for the University of Iowa Hawkeyes under Hayden Fry. Um, this is way before the internet and all of that stuff, and people being able to post about how great they are and send film everywhere. We actually had to make VHS tapes and send them out to coaches. And in my life, I’ve had some great mentors that were willing to actually bind two VHS tapes, stick them together, right, and allow me to dub all of my film, right? We took scratchy film of whatever you could find in that, in Canada at that point of me running the football, and then they, they sent it all over the place. And, uh, this one gentleman by the name of Ron Diaz found me, ran- ranked me the number one, uh, running back in Canada, and I then subsequently got plenty of offers from, uh, US teams. Yeah, it’s like, again, slightly impossible because nobody from Edmonton, Alberta was getting recruited for anything, much less Big Ten football,

Kaylee Williams: Yeah

Trevor Bowlers: you know? Um, then that journey, uh, here was a challenge, right? I– It just wasn’t like, uh, all roses there. I didn’t start right away. I spent, uh, four years on the bench. And my senior year, um, something happened and they said, “You’re gonna get your chance to start.” And within those eight games that I started, I showed enough to get my shot at the NFL. And so I tell guys, “Stay prepared. Your opportunity’s coming. When your opportunity shows up, go and take it to the fullest.”

Kaylee Williams: Tell me about how what you experienced as an athlete translates to entrepreneurship and what you know to be true about how difficult it is to build a company

Trevor Bowlers: You know, everybody’s gonna say the first thing that you need to understand is teamwork. I’m gonna say the first thing you need to understand is belief in yourself. Because you can’t be an effective part of a team if you don’t believe that you can contribute to that team and that you have value in that team. Um, once you’re able to believe in those things and, like, the jump-off point is scary, right? It’s like, uh, Bugs Bunny, one of my favorite things, right? He goes, “Watch that first step. It’s a Lulu.” And that fits with entrepreneurialship like no other

Kaylee Williams: We’re all delusional. It’s true.

Trevor Bowlers: So the thing I think that, that the sports world brings though is it doesn’t give you anything. It makes you have to earn it, right? You earn your spot on the field. And even when you get it, the cra- the craziest thing about the NFL I’ll tell people all the time, this is a job where your boss, his job is to bring your replacement and show him to you and say, “This is our shiny new toy. He’s gonna take your job.” And this happens every year Okay? And so your job is to make sure that this guy here doesn’t take your job and the way you feed your children. Yeah. Right? And that you stay with us. And again, at training camp time and at the off-season, everybody thinks the off-season’s this great time. You get to relax, go play golf, whatever. No. No. You are fighting for your life because the next guy is coming- Yeah … and he’s younger than you and costs less

Kaylee Williams: I mean, it’s truly like capitalism. It’s the free market

Trevor Bowlers: It is the full-on free market. And they dust them off every year and they come and bring them back and show you, “Hey, this guy wants your job.” So

Kaylee Williams: What is Letter B Global?

Trevor Bowlers: So Let It Be Global Technologies came out of several, um, ideas that I had about building technology that not, that doesn’t do regular things, but really looks at the people that it’s, that are gonna use it and design systems for that. We coin that as cultural design, right? Um, we build custom software at this point for a lot of manufacturing and, and, uh, different business organizations that need an operating system or a part of an operating system that they’re looking for and just can’t find because everything’s either bloated or not really built for them and their culture. There are several things that we don’t build, like accounting, because it’s standard, right? There are great packages out there. Go use the accounting packages. But then once you get past some of those standard things, then there’s the way that you work and the way that you grow, and that’s not always standard. And even if you look at, um, larger organizations that would say, you know, like a Coca-Cola or whatever, that would say, “Oh, yes, we’re using this supposedly standard platform.” What they’ve done is they’ve spent $40 million building out the platform and turning it into what they need, AKA you’re not using that. You’re using your own thing truthfully. You know, even if they say they’re using Salesforce, they’re not really using Salesforce. They’re using some version of whatever is in Salesforce

Kaylee Williams: And I think that consumer expectations around technology are evolving because with AI, it’s easier than ever to make things more custom, more bespoke for what you want it to be

Trevor Bowlers: bespoke is a great way to put it. And the thing is, is the rapid adoption of the technology isn’t only about the technology existing, it’s about the technology providing you with what you need. One of our biggest compliments, right? Um, one of our customers, ABC Disposal, right, they do garbage, and one of the, and the production manager, right, or, uh, the fleet manager came and he goes, “This thing works exactly the way my brain works. It literally allows me to do everything I need to do in a day. I need more.”

Kaylee Williams: A sign of great technology. No? You’re not fighting it. It understands you. Yes. It just fits

Trevor Bowlers: Yes

Kaylee Williams: How long have you been in business?

Trevor Bowlers: Uh, we’ve been in business since 2008. Yeah.

Kaylee Williams: I do that math right?

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah, but it’s the crazy part, right? You gotta think about it. What was going on in ’08?

Kaylee Williams: Oh, the financial crisis. You launched your business in the financial crisis. You know, I actually read a statistic very recently that said recessions are great for entrepreneurship

Trevor Bowlers: They are.

Kaylee Williams: create problems, and entrepreneurs like you love to solve problems.

Trevor Bowlers: Yes

Kaylee Williams: Can you tell us the origin story? How did this thing get started?

Trevor Bowlers: Um, it starts with my wife being, uh, about six months pregnant and me coming home saying, “Honey, you’ll never know what we’re about to do. We’re about to embark on an entrepreneurial journey, right? I have this idea.” And a lot of things, right, then people around me who know me will say, “Oh gosh, it always starts with, ‘Hey, you know, saw this thing and I have this idea.’” Right? And so Letter B came out of the solution to an idea because we were dealing with a lot of, um, student retention issues ’cause I was, at the time, building the redesign of the FAFSA form to bring instructions into the FAFSA form, uh, forward, right? Because before you used to have to go dig through, like, the help and whatever, and what we were trying to do is bring contextual help. So if you’re on this screen, the help was gonna be about that area. Yeah, revolutionary at that time, right? Right. You know. And so ’cause before everybody would just build their help file. And so then, um, now today, of course, you expect the help to be in context and, you know, with a little AI quip in there and whatever else, you know, to then lead you to the next point. But back then, that was, uh, that was quite the different idea that you could press the button and it would actually show you help about the question that you’re talking about. So, um, in that whole scenario, students, as we were looking at student data and student statistics, um, I realized that everybody was always talking about a survey, but never able to connect the student past the survey. And so my idea was to build a system that could do that. However, we were about 10 years ahead of our time because nobody was really willing to give up their personality for a cat video yet

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Like before, really before social media, but before social media

Trevor Bowlers: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so us saying, “Hey, tell us who you are, and then we’ll connect you to your campus,” it was like, “Ah,

Kaylee Williams: People were

Trevor Bowlers: my privacy,” and all. Yeah, and then the schools were worried about all that stuff. And so yeah, it, that didn’t, that didn’t take off. So we had to do what entrepreneurs do: pivot.

Kaylee Williams: Good to pivot.

Trevor Bowlers: It’s- Early. It was a very early pivot, right? But we pivoted, and here we are, right? It is through that pivot we’ve had to adjust, um, and really dig into the custom software thing, because part of while we were starting that, people heard that we were de- designing software and, um, we got a few opportunities to build software for other companies and all. And then we got, uh, a op- opportunity to develop software for a few startups and really help them go to market. Some of them now, um, sell over… Like, okay, so we built this quoting thing. It generally quotes over two to three million auto parts per day. Yeah, and we built it from scratch from the day one So that’s a, that’s a very successful startup that is still going today

Kaylee Williams: Fun. You got to have a hand in, in their early days in

Trevor Bowlers: Yes. Yes.

Kaylee Williams: you… I, I’m hearing kind of a through line here that you’re very centered on your customer. You care a lot about your customer. You tried to build this in step with your customer, and a pivot is often a great example of keeping the customer at the center of your decision-making. Where did you learn this? Did you take any classes? Did you have any training in entrepreneurship, or what were the resources that you pulled along the way? Did you have mentors?

Trevor Bowlers: I did have mentors, but one of the best mentors was my mom.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah

Trevor Bowlers: My mom was a retailer extraordinaire, and I would watch her take someone frustrated because they can’t get this thing to fit, and they’re trying to find something for whatever it was, right? And she would outfit them from head to toe with even a bow, right? And it would all go together, and the person would walk out beaming, right? Because she just listened to what they needed, not told them what she wanted to give them. And I was like, “Huh, wow.” Because, because sometimes I’d go to work with her and I’d get to see this, or she’d come home and tell us stories about her best customers of the day or the people who came back and always come back because they can’t find someone else to take care of them like that, you know? And then when I got to Tippie, it was always a discussion of to what degree do you care about, you know, delivering a lot of what you do to the customer’s needs versus trying to build something basic or scale your business so that it’s not customer-focused or whatever. You know what I mean?

Kaylee Williams: looking for a problem. Beautiful solution, but nobody wants it.

Trevor Bowlers: wants it

Kaylee Williams: Which happens a lot.

Trevor Bowlers: Yes. Yeah. And so with- within those things, right, and those trainings, like I really, really would say my primary mentor was my mother in, in that way that she did things. I just saw the reactions of the people that she served, and I saw the, the change in once you help them, they come back

Kaylee Williams: Mm-hmm Product market fit.

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah

Kaylee Williams: Now you’re based in Cedar Rapids, right?

Trevor Bowlers: Actually, Coralville. We’re in Coralville.

Kaylee Williams: Coralville. And, um, how many staff do you

Trevor Bowlers: We have 17 people in our team.

Kaylee Williams: Are they remote? Do you have an office?

Trevor Bowlers: Oh, gosh. So we were the original non-officers. We had no office, right, until after COVID.

Kaylee Williams: Until after

Trevor Bowlers: Until after COVID,

Kaylee Williams: And Then you got- an office.

Trevor Bowlers: then we got an office. When everybody else was going remote, yeah, we were like, “Ah, no, no, we’ve been remote. Let’s try this office thing.”

Kaylee Williams: And how’s it going?

Trevor Bowlers: It’s actually going really well. Um, the, the, one of the primary uses for our office is engaging, um, interns, right? Because one of the things that we found is in today’s market of everybody wanting to be remote and stuff like that, it’s, uh, sometimes a little bit of a challenge to build up that team chemistry and trust. And then sometimes hiring becomes even a bigger challenge. So internships gives us a chance for young people to literally get a six-month interview

Kaylee Williams: Huh. Yeah, test drive

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah. And young developers get a chance to learn, but we also get a chance to learn if they’re able to, one, solve problems, two, care about the people they’re solving the problem for, and three, not depend on someone else to solve a problem that they could solve themselves

Kaylee Williams: Love that, that, uh, s- that initiative to learn yourself. Yeah that’s a… Man, that’s a great skill. If that’s the only thing they take out of that internship, what a great learning opportunity for them. Where do you find the students?

Trevor Bowlers: Um, we actually find them through University of Iowa and Kirkwood, uh, sometimes Hawkeye, um, Iowa State kids and all.

Kaylee Williams: got your little pipeline

Trevor Bowlers: we try and connect with that. And even in our sports business, which we also do technology, we pull in those University of Iowa and Cornell College and even the D3s and stuff like that, just the students that wanna be part and learn, and we’re gonna put you into the world. We’re not gonna say, “This is an internship. You just go over there and sit down and don’t do anything and just tell somebody.” Exactly. No. No. No, no, no. No. No. We’re– We want you to come out of there with some amazing things. And one of the reasons why I do internships that way is because when I, when I went looking for internships, one I ran into Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and they took us through their entire management training program. We had to go and do everything that any other Enterprise employee would do as interns. And it struck me like, “Wow, I get all of this experience,”

Kaylee Williams: Yeah.

Trevor Bowlers: right? And in depth, and I have to actually do the job after. It’s like go and do every job, actually wash cars and all, right?

Kaylee Williams: I ki- kinda love that. Okay.

Trevor Bowlers: Right. And then, uh, my other internship was with a technology company called Patient Education Institute, and I walked in the door and they said, “You’re a marketing intern, so you’re learning about marketing.” And I’m like, “Yes.” And they go, “So you’re a marketing student, you know the latest things about marketing.” And I’m like, “Yes.” And they said, “Okay, we need your help marketing.” And I was like, “Yeah, I’m the…”

Kaylee Williams: Day one, get in.

Trevor Bowlers: And so we dug in, and I met the owner years later when I came back to, to Iowa, um, after being in Florida and Missouri for years, and he said, “To this day, we use several of the things that you taught us, and one was we never let a box leave our doors without our names on it

Kaylee Williams: Cool. And that came from

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Wow.

Trevor Bowlers: Because they used to have Dell and all these other things on their boxes. And I’m like, “Hold on here. We put a ton of energy in this product, and you’re gonna let somebody else’s name be on your box?”

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. Gosh, it seems simple, right? But that’s the kind of thing somebody coming into the organization would notice right away. But when you’re in it every day, you’re living, focused on everything, you just don’t see it.

Trevor Bowlers: Mhm.

Kaylee Williams: That’s incredible perspective. For that company, that’s well worth the price of an intern, I would think. Hopefully it was a paid in- internship.

Trevor Bowlers: It was. It was. And they, you know, they were happy with me. They, you know, um, I, I, I’m still friends with, uh, with the owner and all, and it’s, it was just, it was just a great experience for me and that’s one of the reasons why I like doing internships to give that type of level of experience, right? We take kids that think they wanna be developers and say, “Okay. Well, first we’re gonna test code, then you’re gonna write some code.” “You want me to write code?” “Yep, and that’s gonna get published.” “Wait, this isn’t just throwaway code?” “No, no. People are gonna use it. They’re gonna be mad about what you did.”

Kaylee Williams: your time, kiddo.

Trevor Bowlers: your time.

Kaylee Williams: I wanna talk about, because like many entrepreneurs, you have lots of ideas, and I would imagine you’re pulled in many different directions. And you’ve, you had an idea and you pursued it and actually pulled the thread on it, and it’s become almost a separate business or a separate product that you sell for youth sports. So kinda getting back to your own roots in athletics, can you talk a little bit about what that product is and who the customer is, and what makes it different from what you do at Letter B focused on working with manufacturers?

Trevor Bowlers: Okay. So in a way, it’s still a very business-based product, right? Um, but it’s for the planning and planning and preparation side of youth sports events, right? And so we called it Illuminate. And Illuminate, the reason why it kind of fits is because it takes you out of the dark of, “Okay, hey, who has the binder that has all the sponsors in it? Hey, where’s the spreadsheet for the, um, the, the referees and then the vendors?” Right? “Okay, where’s the budget spreadsheet from two years ago so we can do our comparison?” Okay? All of that stuff that happens to you, um, when you’re planning an event and when you’re organizing an event. Illuminate allows you to then put in several project boards, right, that are customizable, so the stages aren’t just, uh, what, new, in progress, and done. You can actually just step out your stages. Illuminate also allows you to do budgets right inside of the tool and attach them to projects. So now you’re not sitting there going, “Okay, which event did we have that budget for?” Right? It cleans up all of that as well as then allows the team to communicate inside of the project with a full-on discussion about what it is that we’re doing or not doing. And where that comes from is literally on the other side of what we do is, um, uh, a sports organization called Mid-America 7v7, and as we were looking and growing, there wasn’t something out there that would allow us to plan and allow us to prepare, because we’re going to be preparing 30 events for next year. And in doing that, right, how do you, how do you even prepare six events with a team of five trying to communicate? And so that’s where Illuminate now is going to really take that sports world or that, that event planning world by storm, right? Because we’re not a solution looking for a problem. There’s a problem.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah, you solved your own problem, which is actually a very, like, tried and true way for great companies to get started. Often the founders are just solving their own problems

Trevor Bowlers: He had a problem.

Kaylee Williams: Cool.

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah

Kaylee Williams: That’s so cool. Now, do you have any customers yet or is this thing still kind of in beta being used?

Trevor Bowlers: Um, is a- we actually have four customers, right? Uh, four paying customers. And, um, really the funny part about what we’re doing, right? ‘Cause of course, being the tech guy, I’m a builder, right? And I like ideas and stuff like that, so I get the next idea and it’s like, “Okay, hey, let’s, let’s, we can build more into this or we can build more,” and, and then it’s like, “No, stop. We gotta sell. We gotta… Actually, we have something already. We have the thing that we need to sell,” right? “We have the thing that we need to go to market with.” Yeah.

Kaylee Williams: this isn’t a push and pull

Trevor Bowlers: Right. “So let’s, let’s stop building for a second and go to market, and it’s not just call up whoever you know and all. How about we try and plan and have a strategy?” You know, ’cause our tool is about planning.

Kaylee Williams: Sure. Yeah. You ought to have a strategy, a go-to-market strategy

Trevor Bowlers: And so today on the way here, that’s what we were doing. We were working on the developing the go-to-market strategy for Illuminate, right?

Kaylee Williams: Is it exciting for you to be back in the builder seat again, like kind of starting from the beginning? Or do you hate it? Are you like, “Ugh

Trevor Bowlers: Love every second of it.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah

Trevor Bowlers: It’s, it, it, it brings me so much joy, right? And so much energy. But then I was also… Today, one of the things I like doing is puzzles, ’cause if I’m doing the puzzle, then it gives me a chance to just think about the outside of what’s going on versus, you know, where we are. And in doing the puzzle, I found there was an area that I couldn’t clearly see because it was cluttered, so I started removing clutter. And I’m like, “This is what building is doing to me right now.” It’s the clutter that’s stopping me from working through the go-to-market strategy. Because it’s easy for me to just go back here and, like, get that fun dopamine of creating the next button or the next feature, right? But developing that go-to-market strategy and having the fear or the challenge of someone calling my baby ugly, right, is a little tougher. And- Fear.

Kaylee Williams: scary, isn’t it?

Trevor Bowlers: Yes. And so that’s where then we looked at it and said, “Okay, let’s declutter.” So we have a team, so let’s let the team now have more of the development or design requirement process, because we have the basics of what we want to build, right? And we have problems that we’ve solved for several groups now. So let’s box that up and go to market with it. And so now then I’ve removed that clutter. Well, I haven’t removed it fully yet. It’s just been identified that there’s, that I have clutter

Kaylee Williams: Well, do you– So how do you think about continuing to optimize the product as you start to bring new customers? Ideally, the go-to-market lead to new customers. Do you have feedback loops built into the product so they can And how will you balance their demands on product while also trying to stay focused on

Trevor Bowlers: Here’s the crazy part about this product. The thing that we did with it is we actually built, um, the one thing that everybody has frustration with because once they get into their operating system and all, they can’t ever just put out there a form that then gets them more data into the product without having to go through a whole bunch of hoops. This has an AI form builder in it that you can create any form you need to get that feedback, right?

Kaylee Williams: Cool

Trevor Bowlers: And so we said, “Well, if we’re going to be doing the sports thing with it and everything else, and we have these customers, why don’t we put Letter B in there and then use the feedback tools that we created to collect customer information?” Key.

Kaylee Williams: Eat your own dog food. Give it a shot.

Trevor Bowlers: Give it

Kaylee Williams: That’s brave. I Love it.

Trevor Bowlers: So that’s what we did. We dropped Letter B in- Yeah and then we started using it, and one of our primary things is going to be using it for the feedback loop to be able to then plan our go-to-market using our planning tool.

Kaylee Williams: Yeah. And see how it goes, and if you bump into bugs or issues with feature limitations, you can solve that. You own the product.

Trevor Bowlers: Yes

Kaylee Williams: This is very exciting. How can our listeners, if they wanna check out the product, how could they do that? Or talk to you about LetterB if they’re manufacturing?

Trevor Bowlers: Oh, geez, man. We love talking to manufacturing companies. Some amazing things get built out there, and I’m like,

Kaylee Williams: Especially in Iowa. I didn’t realize it’s such a big industry.

Trevor Bowlers: Oh,

Kaylee Williams: Here, Pella,

Trevor Bowlers: yeah.

Kaylee Williams: IMCO, we got tons of manufacturers

Trevor Bowlers: sorts of stuff and like even, even down to like this, some little mini gears that I was just at the other day- Yeah … right? That’s gonna get put on some like, you know, trillion dollar fighter jet.

Kaylee Williams: Oh, yeah. I’m, I’m pretty sure there’s a manufacturer, in fact, maybe even in Coralville, that manufactured parts that went onto Artemis, the, Yeah. the rocket that went out around the moon.

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah. I j- I just ran into a few guys that said that, you know, “Hey, we, um, built the cells for your EV batteries.” Right? And they were in Williamsburg. Yeah.

Kaylee Williams: I believe it

Trevor Bowlers: And I’m like, “Okay, this is great.” And so, um, okay, to get in touch with us at Letter B, right? Um, you can get my direct, tbowlers@letterbglobaltech- technologies.com or letterbglobal.com, right? Or just check us out at letterbglobal.com,

Kaylee Williams: And we’ll put that in the show notes as well if you’d like to follow the link

Trevor Bowlers: Yeah. And then the– We haven’t, like, really created a great, um, URL for Illuminate yet, and so we just made it a sub of Letter B, right? And it’s, it’s iplan, ’cause that’s simple enough, right? Illuminate is kind of challenging for people. And so it’s iplan.letterbglobal.com. Yeah.

Kaylee Williams: I wanna ask you what advice you would give to an early stage entrepreneur here in Iowa. If you could give them any advice, looking back on your own career mistakes What do you say to them?

Trevor Bowlers: Hmm. I would first say, um, go do it, right? If there’s something that you’re trying to figure out if you can do it or not, go do it. Um, go try sell it. Go sew it together and build it. I’ve sewn together many things, right? Um, several products that we’ve created. Needle to thread and sewn it together, and then put it out there to see if it would work and all.

Kaylee Williams: And it doesn’t always work

Trevor Bowlers: It doesn’t always work, right? But you get the feedback, and you get the reality of the situation for yourself. But you can’t get there if you’re always sitting there going, “Well, we could, we might. It, it, it’s, it’s possible, I think.” No, go do it, right? Go find a way to make it happen. Yeah. And then the other thing that I would say is find a, find a group of advisors that can get you assistance with the things that you don’t know, right? Because you are the entrepreneur, and there is a world that you do, right? So say you’re a financial entrepreneur, entrepreneur. You’re, you’re not the sales guy, you’re not the lawyer, you’re not the other pieces of what’s going on. And so finding that advice group that will be able to not charge you for every answer, but at least let you bounce i- ideas off of what is possible and what is not, and things that you’re gonna run into. Because the day you get in business, someone’s looking to put you out of business, right? Or compete with you, right? And not necessarily maliciously put you out of business, just they see what you’re doing and they’re gonna say, “Hey, there’s a business there.”

Kaylee Williams: Yeah.

Trevor Bowlers: So

Kaylee Williams: just like the players on these NFL teams, they’re right there

Trevor Bowlers: They,

Kaylee Williams: waiting in the wings.

Trevor Bowlers: they are absolutely right there. And there’s gonna be another one tomorrow, right? And so you have to be ready for that competition. But find people that are able to, um, give you information that you don’t have, right? Tap into sources that have varied experiences and different than yours. And the last thing I would say is talk to everyone Right? Because you never know where that next thing is that you can solve, right? Like, it, it’s… People is still the primary driver of business

Kaylee Williams: Thank you, Trevor, for being on the podcast today and for sharing a little bit of, of your experience and your insight for our listeners, many of whom are, you know, builders and entrepreneurs here in Iowa. Um, really glad to have you in the studio today

Trevor Bowlers: Thank you for having me. Like, I’ve, I’ve enjoyed this. I love talking about, you know, tech and, like, it energizes me, you know, to be able to share these stories. But like, you know, if you need me for anything, let me know ’cause I’m willing to share.

Kaylee Williams: Okay. All right. We will bring you back. I can almost guarantee it. I would love to check in with you in, in a few months and see how Illuminate’s going and

Trevor Bowlers: Do the go-to-market strategy?

Kaylee Williams: see that go-to-market strategy in action. You can tell me what you learned

Trevor Bowlers: Oh gosh. Yeah, it’s, it, it… You know, this is, um, I’ll have to say, we’re really excited because we’ve actually like been through this a few times now to know that we actually need to pause and develop the strategy.

Kaylee Williams: Mm-hmm

Trevor Bowlers: You know? ‘Cause normally it’s go, go, go. Here we go. All right, let’s go. And it’s like, okay, before we go, let’s plan.

Kaylee Williams: Gotta slow down if you wanna go fast.

Trevor Bowlers: Yes, ’cause smooth is fast all day. Now, now my son’s gonna freak out because he’s like, “Oh man, see there’s Dad and smooth is fast.”

Kaylee Williams: Well, I can’t take credit for, for that one. That’s actually my father-in-law.

Trevor Bowlers: There you go

Kaylee Williams: sometimes you need to slow down if you wanna go…

Trevor Bowlers: Yes

Kaylee Williams: Good advice. All right. Well, Trevor, we’ll, we’ll see you back soon. And to our listeners, check out the show notes if you wanna check out, uh, Let Her Be Global, or if you’d like to reach out to Trevor and hear a little bit more about the work that he does. Thank you for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week