Morgan Friedman (Host): Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the latest episode of client horror stories. I’m excited to have with me, Brandon Kirkpatrick, did I pronounce it in the most redneck way possible?

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): That’s it. You got it.

Morgan Friedman (Host): I was instructed by viewers to pronounce it in a redneck way. Now that I’ve got your name down, Pat, let’s jump right into your story. I have my cup of coffee in hand. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Same, same. It’s full. You can see it, it’s 

full. We’re gonna be here for a while. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): We will be here.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): So a little bit of backstory here, I joined a startup, a tech startup in 2020, and we were doing some really cool things. 

We were building autonomous drones. So, for all the people not in the autonomous drone world, because it’s a pretty small group of people…. the product that we had built or we’re building at the time was, drone sits in a box, somebody needs a drone on site, they push a button on their computer screen or phone or whatever. 

And the drone goes to the location, right? And it starts looking around and this is really for security purposes, right? 

And so, we built this thing fully functional. We flew it literally from all over the world, even though we were here, other people were flying it, we had pilots, safety pilots… but in that process, we got… this is a chance encounter on a motorcycle ride with a potential client.

So, there was this meeting that happened, right? And like, “Oh, what do you do?” 

Morgan Friedman (Host): A meeting happens on a motorcycle ride? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): On a motorcycle ride, yes. And so let’s just… let’s call her Mary. Mary was on the motorcycle ride with somebody at our company… our founder, and just kind of happened to start talking, right?

And… come to find out, like they kind of needed what we were doing. They wanted it. And let’s just call them the FBI. Let… it’s not the FBI just for simplicity’s sake. Let’s just call them the FBI. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): A three letter agency.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): A three-letter agency…

Morgan Friedman (Host): I just… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Wanted… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): I just want… I want to pause and make the observation, that when you deal with three-letter agencies or potential three-letter agencies, I kind of believe coincidences don’t exist.

Like, the start on day one of intelligence operations, like day four of training, they teach you that nothing happens by chance. That hot woman that comes to talk to you in the bar, maybe it’s because you’re that sexy and that cute that the beautiful woman will want to pick you up. 

Or maybe, there’s a reason why someone is having this hot woman come over and get… so to me, three letter agency, having a chance encounter on a motorcycle ride, it asks me, what is happening here?

I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it’s definitely going in an interesting direction. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): I don’t know. I don’t control those things. I understand. But we didn’t know this person before, right? And it’s not like, I mean, it’s the FBI. It’s not like it’s the CIA, right? And so… or are they, who knows?

So, one of the things that we started talking about was like, “Oh, what do you do? What does your system do?” You know, they’re asking us, and so we start these conversations, right? 

And so, if you know anything about startup life or the drone industry itself, American-made drones are not cheap and they’re especially not cheap when you put them in something else and make them fully autonomous, right?

So you can buy a… I’ll say a cheap Chinese drone, a good quality industrial drone for about $15,000 at the time. American-made drones by themselves were… somewhere in the range of one-eight to 25, unless you went with a different version and it was a lot more expensive. Maybe it’s a 100K.

And so these are very expensive things, so when you put them inside, they get very expensive. And so, we start this conversation… really more as a, “Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s talk to these folks. They seem to need what we have. They seem to want it.” 

They have some real use cases that would save them money, which… if you know anything about the federal government, they love to save money, right?

It would keep them from doing some other activities that they didn’t have to do because you can trade out versus a helicopter, things like that if you’re doing inspections and that type of thing. 

And so we get connected with this woman and this thing drags on for… two years… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Two years? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Two full years, right? And so, we went into it… I don’t want to say blind, because, the people that we’ve worked with have dealt with… with government types of bureaucracies and purchasing, and how long that takes, and budget cycles, and like, it’s very, very complicated. And so we anticipated all of those things, right?

We didn’t go into it thinking like, oh, this’ll be easy, we’ll close it in three months and we’ll move on down the road. We knew it was going to be kind of a long drawn out process, but, the horror came in from the side that there were things that we didn’t know. There were things that… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Okay.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): That we just like… we got blindsided with… it wasn’t until two years in that we got blindsided by this stuff. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): So, this is an interesting point. Something I try to do in every episode is to have a new lesson. And we’ve had like 70 episodes and incredibly there’s always a new lesson. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Oh, gosh.

Morgan Friedman (Host): But I feel like already, one interesting point has come out. Like that notion of setting a time limit before getting… before giving up. 

Like, knowing nothing about the surprise of that door… just knowing two years. It’s like, if you’re waiting two years for a client to happen, it’s never going to happen.

Like, they’re playing with you. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): I don’t think that’s 100 percent true. I think…

Morgan Friedman (Host): Feel free to disagree with me. Bring out the New Yorker and you say, “Morgan, you’re wrong.” Let me tell you a… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Well, I’m from Texas. I’m gonna be very nice and polite. At least I should be, right? No, I don’t think that’s entirely true. I don’t think they were playing with us. 100%, they were real. But there’s a difference. 

There’s a difference in, it being real and having to fit it into a budget, and there are other people that make this decision. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Well, we’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s just talk about time limits. Because I think it’s… I’ve never addressed it before and I actually think it’s a really interesting point.

So, I often talk about managing clients and dealing with them through the metaphor of dating. Like, just how would you do it? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Oh, absolutely. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Like, it’s… they’re just different types of relationships. You need to be excited. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Sure. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): You need to have good communication. You need to align your expectations. Do you want to get married or have a one-night stand?

It’s just different types of relationships. And the relationship metaphor I would give here, is if a girl is dating a guy or any gender, it’s 2024, anything goes… that two humans are dating and one of them wants to get married and is like, “Where’s the ring? Where, like, where’s the ring?” 

And the other one says, “Oh yeah, the ring is coming in a month, in a month, in a month, in a month.” And two years go by, like, I think you’re right. 

The right strategy for the girl is to set a time limit. I’ll tell him I want to ring and expect to get married within a year, and if he doesn’t do it within a year, bam, I’m out of here. I think enforced time limits are very powerful.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): I think so, but I think there’s also a line there, right? So, I think when you’re walking in… especially with government, two years isn’t crazy. It’s not that crazy. 

I mean, when you think of the way budgets are set, especially depending on when you start that relationship, you may hit the end of their budget cycle immediately, or you may be right in the middle of it.

And so, setting that timeline is important, but saying that everybody has to fit a single specific timeline, I don’t think that exists, right? 

And so, typically for government, you’re going to see about… usually people set their budgets around September, August, usually it’s in the summer. And then they go into effect in the fall.

And so, a lot of times that’s the case for local governments. It depends on location and stuff. But if you hit it at the wrong time, now you’re doing kind of a lead in discussion into the budget cycle. 

And if you cross that line, like it didn’t get allocated, now you’re pushed back a year almost automatically because they couldn’t fit it in.

I mean, we’ve dealt with this in a couple of cases. And so aside from this timeline lesson, government… selling to government takes longer, just as a general rule. 

And so, it gets really complicated. I agree, your timeline… timelines make sense, but I think be aware of who you’re talking to and when you’re talking to them. That’s really important. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): I’m sold. I’m convinced that if your budget is set once a year, and you happen to miss that deadline, you start talking four months before it’s set, and that’s just not enough time for them to do it. Guess what? You add 12 months to it. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Exactly. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): So I said, “Okay, I understood.” So, I can see how it could become a year and a half conclusion. Some people just have much more patience than I have. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): If you don’t have much patience, do not sell to government. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Yeah. Let’s date for 40 years. Maybe after 40 years, we’ll get married. Well… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Maybe after four… yeah. Maybe we’ll get out of debt after… oh, nope, there’s more debt. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly. Okay. Okay. So, this is an interesting tangent on timing. So two years… now… before this tangent, you’re about to say that a whole bunch of revelations came out about two years in? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Right, about two years in. So, we’re… through those two years, we’re doing R&D, right? We hadn’t made sales to anybody.

We’re still building the product, and we’re listening to them as kind of an anchor customer, to say, “Hey, if we can land y’all, we can make this go really big because you’re going to support us for a long time.” That’s the type of relationship you want to build, especially with somebody like that, especially with Mary at the FBI.

And so, we’re doing R&D, we’re taking their feedback in and so for the first about year and a half, it was three people. It was Mary, who was really what we thought was the decider. The person that kind of making the call and driving forward this initiative on their side. 

And then a couple of alternate people who were a little more technical, who could evaluate a little bit more… and so we’re doing R&D through this process, right? But the sales process for a physical product, especially government related, is a little bit different than a software product, right?

And so we’re trying to do demos. If you know anything about a hardware demo that flies, that is not completely weatherproof, it gets a little wild when you’re trying to plan a demo for more than one person.

You can’t just do it ad hoc. Like, “Oh, hey, the weather’s good today. Let’s fly today. You should just hop on and see this thing.” And so you’re dealing with all of these, like, “Oh man, the winds above 40 miles an hour today. We can’t fly because the FAA says we can’t fly.” There are some really specific laws that are in place.

So the manufacturer is… says, “You can’t fly it in this type of conditions.” And so we’re dealing with all of these things… and so, that just naturally happens. But, we’re scheduling these demos, they’re very complicated. 

You know, and we’re trying to make it simple for them, and so we’re being easy to work with because you want to be a person who people feel like it’s easy to buy from you, right? 

And then about really a year and a half in, we get introduced to a whole different group of people, right? And so, for a year and a half, we were thinking like, “Oh, she’s driving this forward on her side.” And we’ve got this leader that is being really an advocate for what she wants out of her program.

And then we get introduced to new people. And those new people, have completely different skill sets, completely different thoughts, and they approach things from a different perspective. Now, mind you… I’ll say as a kind of a tangent… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Go on. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): The government’s really siloed, right? So, if you’ve ever heard of the term, “Silos in business”, they are extremely silent and it gets worse the larger you are, right?

Because you may not even know that there are 10 other people that have to sign off on this. And so, you may not even know of them or know their name. I mean, like it gets really complicated when you sell to that level of an organization versus a small, medium business. One person is going to make a decision.

They’re going to be responsible for all of it and kind of the buck stops there, versus big organizations, very bureaucratic. There’s 10 people that actually need to sign off on this, and then it has to be approved, and then go through the budget process. So it gets really complicated. So, we were introduced to these people, right?

And so, at that point they start asking technical questions, which are really good questions. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Before we get into the security-level questions and what happens in the soap opera, when you are introduced to these people, were you told like their higher level, their lower level, or like… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): No. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Okay. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): They weren’t… that’s the problem. They weren’t higher or lower. They were the same, but in a different area. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): It was just like, okay, now the security team needs to do some due diligence. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yes. Yes. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Something like that. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): And so, it’s like, “Oh, well, I wish we’d have known about this a year and a half ago, so we could have started that conversation with them.

And so I think a useful tangent here is “Multithreading”. If you go through much sales training, you’ll hear about this idea of multithreading and how to get multiple people involved, and I think a big takeaway for me, is that, we relied on the information that she gave us.

And I just want to be very clear, I don’t hate Mary, I don’t hate her at all, I think there were some areas that she didn’t really understand technically, but multithreading… 

Well, let me just finish this thought, I think multithreading… the idea that you go into it looking for those people rather than just sitting back waiting to hear from them when they happen, right? 

So you go into it saying like, who else has to make this decision? Here’s how this product works. Or if it’s a service or whatever, who else should be involved in this, because we want to get them involved from the very beginning. So they go along this journey with us. I think it’s really, really powerful.

Morgan Friedman (Host): Okay. So, this is interesting. I feel like, you’re implying what happened, but what didn’t… but you haven’t yet said it, but what you’re getting at is with your talking about your anger, “Oh, I don’t hate Mary”, it sounds like you thought she had the authority to say yes. 

When really, she either didn’t have the authority or she needed like these 10 other groups to give their sign off as well.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): She had the authority for her budget, but she did not have the technical authority to sign off from a security perspective. 

That was a different team, right? And so, those are different things. There’s different groups of people that make those decisions, that this is technically sound and the federal government won’t be hacked and stuff like that.

We want these people working for us, right? We want these people working for the FBI that say, “Hey, hold on a second, before you buy that thing, are we going to get hacked? Is there something here? Let’s go through a review.” 

You want those people there, so in no way do I hate that they got involved. But at the same time, I’m like, “Man, I wish I’d known these people existed a year and a half ago.”

And so it’s frustrating. It is frustrating. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): So I… okay, this is interesting. So, you want to get something done to clear… maybe it’s useful to ask this question in a positive and negative way. Who has the authority to say yes? And who has the authority to say no? 

And there’s different people, because you need to know… okay, here’s the big CEO here at… he’s actually really the one that decides what happens.

But then you also need to know… but he can be blocked by the board of directors, the… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yes. Yes. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Opposite team, boom, boom, boom, boom. What’s also interesting about this framing… who has the authority to say yes and who has the authority to say no is, it feels like this is useful not only in a sort of sales context where you’re talking about getting this big client for the drones, but also in just managing clients.

You have a client and you want to do some initiative for them. You’re like, “Oh, my client’s website is ugly. Let’s make them a new website.” 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yep. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): So, you need to know who like… who is the person that can say yes, but also, who are all the people that can block it. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Oh, yeah. Yeah, cause there are certain groups of people that can block a lot of things, even though they’re not at the same level, right? 

They may not even be… and we never knew whether they were higher or lower, I think they were kind of similar, to be honest with you, that gets really complicated in government bureaucracies, but… you really, really want to know the client really well and know where all of those… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): But it’s actually interesting because you can look at this on an easy way to think about this concept is, you’re an individual, you just want to be hired for a normal nine to five employment, employee job. 

There is the person that says, “Yes.” The manager of this department is the person that can say yes. So, he’s the one that’s going to hire.

At the same time, the HR department will say, like, does he have the papers in order? Does he have like… does he satisfy the criteria? Does he have whatever? Does he have a criminal record? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): University… where HR has the ability to say no, even though the boss has the ability to say yes. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah, and I think that exists for almost every single client, right? Like, those… unless you’re selling to a single person… I mean, even to the point that if you go out to dinner with a single person business, the wife can say no, right?

“I just don’t feel good about this person.” And so knowing where those are is super helpful. This is why I think it makes a ton of sense, why, government tends to buy from the same people over and over. Because they just know this process and they don’t waste their time because they know who to talk to.

They know… they almost live inside of that ecosystem where they know who to go talk to in addition to the one person and they understand those steps not to take and then the steps to take. That it almost makes it easier for people who are purchasing from a government perspective to purchase.

Morgan Friedman (Host): I like that. And what’s interesting is in working with smaller companies, when you’re… it’s a company of 15 people, you know everyone, and it’s just the same people. And so… but as it gets bigger, these become different departments, people you don’t know personally. So, it’s useful to think about. Who’s going to say yes? And who’s going to say no?

And then to make it even more complex, it’s not only by title, it’s also by personality type. Like, there’s sometimes… there are just powerful people in an organization, an important member of the board of directors… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): That’s right. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): A big investor that will just have these really strong preferences. He’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t do. Don’t do. Don’t do it.” 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): And it gets worse, right? Because it could be something like a congressman that really wants that thing to go through, that will say, “Hey, look, we set your salary and we approve your budgets, you’re going to go with this vendor over that vendor.” Like, to think that doesn’t happen is, somewhat jaded, right?

So, I think that a hundred percent, you’re totally right. I would also say, that after 2020, that’s gotten even more complicated because they are different departments, but they may no longer be at the same place, right?

You know, before 2020, government bureaucracies, they had big buildings, a lot of them work from the same place. Now, multisite locations can be a bit different, but, you may have technical folks all in one building. But, now, it’s like, those people are scattered everywhere. 

So you may not just be dealing with people in one location, you may be dealing with people that are scattered throughout the country, or even the world for that matter. 

And so even finding those times to meet and talk, they just become more complicated. And it’s not impossible, right? But, any little thing like this just makes it more difficult. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Okay, super interesting. Great tangent. So now, what happens? So basically it turns out, Mary, without telling you, needed to get these other departments to sign off.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): That’s right. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): So, the other department started asking security questions and that’s where we got on the tangent. Now what happens next? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): So, they sent us a form. That’s what they said. They said, “We really need you to fill this form out.” And it was detailed, it was complicated. But we went through it, right?

And it probably took a week to turn that around for them. But, a week isn’t a small amount of time from a sales perspective. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Right. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): And so, we’re getting technical people involved, we’re answering questions, we’re digging into really the architecture of how the system was built. And so we answer these questions, we send it all back, and nothing, right?

Like, have you gotten it? Have you read it? Can we talk about this? Like, what… do you have questions? Like, in typical kind of government fashion, just like very quiet for extended periods of time. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Was this form in an ad hoc form of questionnaire for you? Or was it something like off the shelf? Oh, you have to do… you know. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yes. Version 2. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): 97B. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yes. Yeah. It’s like, this thing has existed since 1992, right? And Mary just didn’t know about it because she’s never purchased something like this before.

She’s responsible for X and now they’re getting more technologically advanced and this other thing now applies and it’s like, “Oh shoot, well, here’s another two months setback.”

So, we fill this form out pretty straightforward. We answer their questions, we send it back in, right? And we built everything in the cloud, in the AWS, which is a big government vendor. 

And so we answer their questions, we try to get on a call like, “Hey, talk to us, let us know what you think.” And really what came out of that call was, I think there were… gosh, that was an expensive meeting.

Just as a side tangent, whenever I get into a meeting, I try to figure out how much it costs per hour to sit there for all the people’s salaries. 

Like, to me, it’s kind of like a game of like, man, this is an expensive meeting or, hey, this is a pretty cheap meeting. There’s two people here. Our time is not worth very much. Or maybe it’s worth a lot. 

When you start getting 10, 15 people on a call, man, it just racks up, you know? Fixed costs. And so, we finally get on a call, there’s about 10 people. 

There’s a drone kind of specialist that’s involved that understands drones. There’s also, really like an architecture-infrastructure type of person.

And they start kind of rapid fire question and we’re answering, right? We know how our system is built. We know what we’ve done up to this point. 

They ask us a very specific question, “Hey, is this… by… so it’s software.” Right? It’s hardware and software. “Is this written by software developers outside the US?” Like, yeah, of course.

Like, we were very clear about that from day one, with Mary, right? We’ve got developers in India. They were literally part of our team. 

They weren’t some random company that we’d hired. Like, they were part of the team, they were employees and “That’s not going to work.” What do you mean that’s not going to work?

Like, what are your security parameters around foreign developers? They wouldn’t answer the question. So, in government security world, they prefer US-based only software developers.

Because all the security reasons, do they have…. are they going to try to hack the system? Are they going to try to find a way in?

And so, this has all been developed by folks in India, but you know, I’ve met them in person, they’re friends of mine. They’re good people, but they… the federal government doesn’t know that, the FBI doesn’t know that. And so they have to make sure that, you know, I don’t know these people.

And so we said, ” Well, what are our options? Like, do we fire them all? And do we have to just hire US developers to go through every line of code to make sure there’s no thing in here that’s going to attack anything?” Like, and… I knew there wouldn’t be, right? The whole team knew that.

But, they wouldn’t answer the question. And really at the end of the day, what they came back with, was, if you don’t know, if you don’t know how to do this, and if you already don’t know the answers to these questions, we don’t really want to work with you. Like, we can get the answers to the questions.

In the startup world, I feel like, there are many answers to questions you don’t know. You’re trying to find those answers as you go, as you work along, and to hear, like, well, if you already don’t know the answer… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): But not in government world. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Right. If you already don’t know the answer, we’re not going to tell you the question. That’s actually what was said, right? And so, up to this point, I think we probably spent four or five million dollars. Four or five million dollars over this time. 

A ton of money. I think if I had to boil down, like, how much money they were responsible for almost wasting, I would say it was probably in the area of one to two, just for them… of time that we’ve spent not just working with them, but dragging things out a little bit, right?

Everything drag out a little bit further, you know? And so, it is probably one of the best horror stories that I have. Hopefully, it’s the best I have, right? But also such… it’s such a good lesson. Such a good lesson. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Losing five or six million dollars… is or wasting… is that…

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): It’s big enough to be a powerful… I’m moved by this question that they asked you.

If you don’t already know the answer, we’re not going to even tell you what the question is. And I feel like this is how a lot of the darker underbelly of civilization works. That they…

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Oh yeah, for sure. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Like, there’s this… like basically, civilization is just, everyone’s playing a game and they like, won’t even tell you the game and either and like… and you either… you figure out the game through osmosis or you’re an NPC, who is not playing the game. 

So that question is really a way of saying, we thought you were a player in the game, but you’re really just an NPC who wants to play the game. Sorry, back to being an NPC. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): So, we were kind of left with… after that we were left with, “Well, what are our options?” 

Our options are to hire, basically go out, find, and hire a very expensive technical architect from a security perspective, to audit the system, and then know the answers to these questions that we don’t even have.

And then hire an entirely US software team, to basically… not completely rebuild, but to go through it with a fine tooth comb.

Meanwhile, we’d already pitched a price, right? For these systems… and how this would… so, through all of the normal… okay, here’s the price, here’s what we can do, here’s how we can work with that. 

Once they lock that in, which to me, if it’s not locked in, it’s not locked in, we can always change things.

If you change things, I get to change things. That’s just kind of how I… I don’t assume that I never get to change anything. But they’d already locked us into a price that we were going to honor, right? 

Until they bring all this other stuff up. Well, now, if you have to go out and hire those people to do all those things, the price is going to change. Because software is driven by really two things.

How much software developers costs, and how many of them it takes, and how large you can scale it. And so, it’s like US-based resources are a lot more expensive. 

Probably, at that time, it was probably somewhere around… three to four X? What foreign developers were. And were they going to pay three to four X the price?

Like, that was tough. And so all of that kind of boiled down to us making the decision. And we told them… I told them point blank, I said, “Look, if you’re not willing to commit to a price and stick it through, then we’re not going to spend all this money doing this thing for you. So, we get to go back through this budget process again.”

If you’re not willing to sign some form of commitment where… when we complete these things and we buy this… we… not buy this person. 

We pay for this person and they do all these things, and they know the answers to your vague questions, then we’re not going to make that investment.

We’re not going to invest another $250,000… $500,000… if you’re not even willing to commit to this. And so, we basically walked away after two years. 

And really that next week, the people who were really concerned about security were flying an illegal Chinese-made drone and they posted it on like their Facebook.

And so, we went through this really long process… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Did they post the official… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): They posted it on official social media of… we’ve got this one team of people who is really concerned about security and making sure that there are no foreign developers and then this other group of people that’s like, “But ah, I’m going to fly this Chinese drone that’s banned. I don’t care.”

And it’s like, come on, man. Come on. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): So, question. How come you think these same guys were sticklers with you? But yet, they broke the law for others? 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Completely different group. Completely different group of people. The pilots flying these drones were not the same people that were digging into our software.

Right? It’s just a completely different group of people. And just, I mean, I think this is usually what happens to large businesses. Complete oversight by somebody, right? 

Of they shouldn’t be flying that, there’s no way they should be flying that there. But this one group of people that’s really kind of back in infrastructure type of security people… it’s not the same people making those decisions, about what drones to fly. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): I think that another lesson in there is just to emphasize the randomness of which people happen to be on the team that you’re assigned to. 

Like, there are 20 people on that security team and you happen to be assigned these three, who happened to be like the assholes, while different three just happened to be more lenient. 

Which shows what matters is less being stickler for the rules and more who is the fallible human being that’s actually implementing the policies.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Oh, oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, because the policy can say whatever it is, but if the person making the decision allows it, like, or if they turn away, or they’re… they don’t care about it, or they don’t read it, and they don’t know it, like, you can do whatever you want.

Morgan Friedman (Host): Exactly. Wow. Two years and five million dollars gone. Now we can wind back, and I’m remembering your comment from 15 minutes ago about what you, gave me the hint of what was to come and when you said, “I don’t hate Mary.” 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): I don’t, I really don’t. She was a very sweet person. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): You’re nicer than me. As sweet as she is, wasting two years of my life and $5 million. There’s… I’ll say it differently. You know the old saying, “Don’t contribute to maliciousness where you could attribute to stupidity”? 

Like, I’m not sure I believe that. There’s a fine line, like, at what point is being so naive, indistinguishable in any way from being malicious, said differently?

If I were… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): I agree. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): If said differently, if I were really malicious, I would want everyone to think I’m a good guy, but just really naive, and simple, and stupid. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah. I think that’s really tough to make that decision. And the way I play that is that, you know, kind of fool me once like, okay, you got me. But more than once, then it’s intentional… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Yes. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Right? And so, on the first go round, it… I reserve the right to say like, okay, I’m just going to chalk that one up to… you didn’t know any better. 

This might’ve been the first time you’ve ever had the ability to purchase something like this ever in your entire 30-year career versus like you did this on purpose.

Now, if we didn’t went through that again, if we’d hired those people and went through that process again, and it kind of happened again with a different group of people, I would probably have very bad feelings about a certain person. 

But you know, I don’t want to live my life that way where, I just hate everybody that happens to do me wrong.

I mean, I don’t even know that I’d say it that way but, I think that’s a terrible way to live. And so, I’m going to give people the benefit of the doubt the first time. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): That sounds very healthy, and very mature, as well. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Also $5 million later… 

Morgan Friedman (Host): And poor… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Poor, yeah. Healthier and poorer.

Morgan Friedman (Host): It’s… yeah, I sympathize with Mary’s role in this, as well. Basically, she was in over the head, overhead. 

And to make it even more complex in my experience, often, you have this instinct in sales and also within client work of getting things done, you have this instinct to just ask, what are all the requirements?

But often, the people you’re talking to don’t even know. Often the institution…

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Right. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Itself, doesn’t even know. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): That’s right.

Morgan Friedman (Host): Like, who knew that this guy all the way… far away in some corner of the office to find some obscure protocol for or updated some sort of… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Protocol. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Communication gets exponentially more complicated the larger you get, right?

And so, if it’s just 2 people, there’s 1 line. And if there’s 3 people, or if there’s… yeah, if there’s 3 people, there’s a lot more lines there, right? There’s 3. 

And so it’s exponential how much more complicated that gets the larger organizations get and people can’t know everything, right? They can’t know everything.

And so I would say the biggest lesson here is know your client, know them well, understand where those traps are, and you may need to know it better than they do, right? 

And so, if you approach it that way of… know them very well or get to know them really well, then you lose the… well, I just didn’t know, like, just assume they don’t know something. 

Just assume they don’t know anything and try to figure those things out along the way, especially for things you don’t know that… but that’s tough, right?

Like, how do you learn things you don’t know if you don’t know to go look for them? It really takes something like this to show you, it really takes those failures to show you… 

Okay, those failures… or a mentor, right? A mentor that’s walked through this path before, will be able to help you along with this.

But if you don’t know something the first time, like it’s going to take failure and you’re going to have to do it multiple times. 

Maybe it’s quick and simple and maybe it’s long and complicated and very expensive. But if you keep trying, you’ll get to that place, but you’re going to fail.

Morgan Friedman (Host): I think all those are great lessons. I think it’s great that you interpret everything as positive learning lessons and positive experiences. You might be a better human being than I am.

And these are also great observations to end it on. Any final concluding thoughts or… to share with anyone that’s made it this far, or is this about it?

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): I think, you don’t know what you don’t know. There’s only one way to learn things and that’s either find a mentor or learn it the hard way. 

But I think the most important thing is don’t give up, right? You don’t know what the future holds, right? 

So what kind of came out of this was, now me and… I used to work for this company, and now me and a business partner of mine own it, right?

And so, a lot of that was due to this long drawn out process where we wasted a lot of money. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): I didn’t realize, you now own the… 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Drone company you used to work for. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah. So you don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, so don’t give up. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): That’s great and your company is definitely not spending two years waiting for a government contract.

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Oh, no.

Morgan Friedman (Host): Let’s go find some illegal Chinese drones instead. 

Brandon Kirkpatrick (Interviewee): Yeah, we should just sell those instead. 

Morgan Friedman (Host): Brandon, it was great talking. Great story and I’m happy you’re not giving up and to everyone who’s watched it this far, I hope you learned a bunch of great lessons and some a bunch of new lessons that hadn’t come out of previous episodes and enjoyed it as much as we did.

Thank you for tuning in.