Crafting a Consulting Niche by Merging Finance Skills and Brazilian Culture with Josh Knox

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP Show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from the United States. He works at I Am Josh Knox a bit of a giveaway as who I'm speaking to. He's the CIO and Principal Dynamics Consultant. He was first awarded as MVP in 2023. He has implemented Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Solutions, focusing on project-related solutions for professional service companies. He has a Dynamics 365 Professional, a Jinjitsu Practitioner, a So-So Pickleballer, a mediocre juggler and a pretty good paper aeroplane folder. You can find links to his bio and social media in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, josh.

Josh Knox: 1:44
Thank you, mark. It's wonderful to be here. Just a quick correction I'm not a CIO, I'm a CJO. I'm the Chief Josh Officer in my company Also a late-breaking news, I should say. I did independent consulting under I Am Josh Knox for the last year and a half. Just the last two weeks ago, I started working with a new company called Co-Optimize. Now I am a member of Co-Optimize. Co-optimize is a collective. What is it? Co-operative? It's a group of four of us working together doing business intelligence and other services related to reporting, related to our dynamic experience.

Mark Smith: 2:40
I love it. I love it. You formed a Co-Optimize, so you're independent business owners but Co-Opt together. Is that the situation we are?

Josh Knox: 2:48
yes, the legal entity structure which predates me. It's actually an LLC, but everybody who participate is sort of a. The words get technical I'm sure Joel and Eric will get mad at me for using the wrong words but essentially everyone is paid a salary and then we do profit sharing based on how we do as a company and based on everyone's involvement in the cooperative. It's a really fun experiment. It's a new business model, a new way for consultants to engage Everybody there. Everybody in the cooperative is fun to work with and that was the reason that I joined up.

Mark Smith: 3:36
You got involved. I love it. I love it. Tell me a bit about what you do when you're not doing your day job. What does life mean? What part of the US are you based in? Food, family, fun all those great things that make life exciting.

Josh Knox: 3:54
Food, family and fun yes, that is all the things that make life great and exciting. I live in California, or at least I live in California right now. My wife Luana, and we have two boys. We have Calvin who's four years old, and Lawrence, who's two years old. For the last two years, we've been doing an experiment within a variety of experiments of life, but Luana is from Brazil. Last year we spent six months in Brazil living with her family and then six months in California, and then we did it again, which, I guess originally we were going to take an extended trip to Brazil, but we liked that trip so much that this year we repeated the experiment. From April to the end of September we were in Brazil and that was home. You talk about food, family and fun. Brazilian food is, of course, brazilian barbecue and rice and beans. Every day we have square pizza. We have all kinds of pizza denominations. Really, I desert pizza. I love Brazilian food and Brazilian culture. As you said, I do Brazilian jujitsu and so it's great to be able to train jujitsu there, just with a different group of people than I get to train over here. That's everything that drives my life outside of work is having two little kids, right, a two-year-old and a four-year-old, and they're growing and just learning and growing. I love that. That's everything mixed in with. Shades of Luana's family were in Brazil and shades of my family and my parents were over here in California.

Mark Smith: 5:49
Interesting. So many questions jumped to mind. My good mate, steve Mordu, has moved to Brazil with his Brazilian wife and he seems to be setting up shop there and he loves it. He loves the culture and the environment. How do you find the difference between the US culture and the Brazilian culture? What are the noticeable differences, I suppose, between the two geographies?

Josh Knox: 6:19
When you talk about the culture of one country versus the culture of another country, you're prone to probably generalize far too much about far too many people. But the biggest difference to me is just the amount of conversation, the volume of conversation. So you know, when we're at home, you know it's me and my wife and we talk in the evenings and I work during the day and she chitchats here and there. Right, when we're in Brazil, there's just always people around and there's always conversation and my wife can be with her. You know there'll be three or four different aunts in the house and they'll all be talking. You know, between the five of them they'll have three different conversations going at once, and I love that, right, there's just, there's so much more, so many more words, right, but all that talking is really an expression of love, right, it's an act of caring, and so that's a part of the culture that I like a lot. In some ways, I think maybe let me call it traditions, or think the way things used to be in America, right, I think, with cell phones now, right, like if you just knock on your neighbor's door or just go over to a friend's house and show up on an ounce. They'd be like well, why didn't you call Like, what the heck, I'm busy, right, that doesn't exist there. And so we'd be at home and there'd always be a friend or an aunt would just sort of show up and say, hey, I was just kind of around, what are you guys doing? And I love that. And it's funny because I think even if someone came in in the US and did that, it's strange but also it'd be welcome. I feel like there's a way that we could collide with each other maybe more often, and life would be more enjoyable.

Mark Smith: 8:12
I like that collide with each other. Tell me about the differences with learning Jiu Jitsu in the US as opposed to in Brazil.

Josh Knox: 8:21
I would say that learning Jiu Jitsu in the US, the story of Jiu Jitsu in the US is that there was Brazilian family was training lots of Jiu Jitsu in Brazil and they sort of had these challenge tournaments where they would say, oh, our Jiu Jitsu, martial art, is better than all the others and that Gracie family wound up sort of being involved and we'll say the beginnings of the UFC. So Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the US is Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in Brazil. But I think in Brazil there's probably a lot more people wanna respect their lineage, more maybe of oh, this guy taught me and this guy taught him, and because you're in Brazil you're always one or two skips away from a Gracie somewhere. I think in the US there's more of a wrestling influence, maybe in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and in the US there's probably more of a. Obviously you make generalizations, but there's probably more of a business focus on gyms in the US because they are businesses and here in the US you have to keep the lights on, you have to pay insurance and all those things, and I think in Brazil the situation, at least places I've trained is more like insurance, what's that? And so that's a whole different business model that you have a lot of things that you don't have to worry about, yeah, but obviously there's very high level Jiu Jitsu in the US and very high level Jiu Jitsu in Brazil as well.

Mark Smith: 10:01
Is it all about being? If you're put in a situation where you needed to defend yourself as an? I've been to one Jiu Jitsu class and it killed me. But basically, how to handle knife attack, how to handle a broken bottle attack, how to if you were in a situation that required you to incapacitate the attacking party? You have the skills to do it.

Josh Knox: 10:28
No, I don't, I'll be. I mean, jiu Jitsu is a type of wrestling, it's a sport within certain parameters and, right, there is a self defense element to it. So I'm probably more prepared to handle myself in a situation where I'm being attacked than had I never done Jiu Jitsu. But I certainly don't want to go looking for a fight. I think there's a meme right of you ask guys and you say like oh, what kind of animal do you think you could beat in a fight? Bite a chicken? That's probably a chicken. What about a pig? I'm kind of like I could probably beat a bear. Right, I have no illusions, I'm a terrible fighter. But to me the Jiu Jitsu is really about it's problem solving and leverage, and so to me it's kind of how do you get just a little bit further around the person, or how do you flip them and take somebody down? To me, the things that I like about Jiu Jitsu are that type of kinetic problem solving, kind of like a almost like a chess match of arms and legs. That's how I think of it. I like it.

Mark Smith: 11:43
I like it. Are you gonna involve your kids?

Josh Knox: 11:46
If they want to be involved. Calvin's four. He's been to a class or two. When you're four, a Jiu Jitsu class is really just running around in your pajamas. It's similar to a gymnastics class probably. But if it's something that they like, then I hope they do it and I'll give them an opportunity to do it. But I see childhood as an opportunity to expose your kids to a lot of different things, but they have to choose what it is that they really liked or enjoy doing.

Mark Smith: 12:21
I like it. I like it. Okay, tell us about you. Know you've done a lot of work around advising young folks that are, or folks that have joined the ERP Consulting community. Tell us a bit about that. You wrote a series around advice to young ERP consultants and you've had feedback. Tell us about that.

Josh Knox: 12:49
When I was working in a large organization with with lots of other consultants, it occurred to me that the bottleneck within the industry it really felt like the bottleneck was they're just. We always needed more people to do the job. It was always how do we get more consultant? You know, we've won all this work. All these people want to implement the ERP, but we just need more capable people to do the work. And that had me thinking for a long time where do ERP consultants come from? My own path was a little bit different and I think the paths of lots of consultants is a little bit different. But I graduated college with a degree in economics. Then I worked in logistics for a couple of years and that company didn't want to do well. And then I started a technology advertising company with a friend of mine in California and that didn't do too well. And so I have these failures that had shown me lots of different parts of business and I was trying to figure out what to do. Or you know, beyond, this tech advertising company that I was working with and a friend of mine said asked me the types of things that I was doing and I explained all these things I was doing in Excel and he goes oh, that's kind of like an ERP for your company. And I said, oh, what's an ERP? And he says, oh, an ERP is what I do. I'm an ERP implementer. Maybe you should try and be an ERP implementer. I think you'd be good at this and he was very right. So, saul Gomez, if you're out there listening to this, thank you for changing my life and sort of moving me from just just a job into what I really see as as a vocation, and I think part of what makes me good at consulting, at being an ERP consultant, is it's that collection of lots of different types of experiences that that gave me this unique set of both soft skills and hard skills. And so so where do the future ERP consultants come? Because not everyone's going to come from this crooked path. Right, obviously say you know, we could hire ERP consultants straight out of college. You know, find, find new kids that are smart, trying them up, and then they'll be able to go to the world. Or you have people that are maybe already work with ERP, and then they're switching, and that's almost like the table stakes of how do you get people in the door that are excited about the industry. But then one of the frustrations that I had as an ERP consultant was well, how do I get better at this thing that I'm doing? I was very fortunate that within my first year, I had just really incredible mentorship. So Joe Lekty who is now my co-worker, co-member, co-worker, owner, whatever you call it that co-optimized our cooperatives. You know, he really just set me up for success by showing me, oh, these are the things you need to do, these are the things you need to avoid, right. This is what listening looks like, right. This is what good questions look like. This is how we move the project forward, right. And he was just so masterful at teaching me a lot of those things. And then, as Joel sort of ascended the ranks into more of other management and director roles and was no longer able to consult me directly, I always felt like, well, you know where am I or how am I getting better at what I'm doing? And I felt like I didn't have a lot of guideposts or a lot of you know, indications of, oh yeah, moving this direction or moving that direction, and it was about that time, right? So I guess in 2020 is when I took your 90-day challenge, and that was great because that showed me you know, oh yeah, the things that you're thinking these are good ways to good directions to move in right. Well, you know, this is how you improve on soft skills. This is how you improve on our hard skills. It was kind of nice that I could sort of build, building a roadmap there, but anyways. So this is a problem that I've thought about a lot, and then I last year I started doing a lot of independent writing and one of the independent writing exercises that I did was just about advice to a young ERP consultant that's what I called it or trying to think of the things. Right, you know, you're brand new, you're now an ERP consultant because you have that title, but you don't know a whole lot. You're not you know. How do you? So how do you get to a place where you know things, or what are the things that you should do or should look out for to get better at? The call it the art right of ERP consulting. So it's a 10-part series. We can link to it here in the show notes. But you know simple things right, like just taking notes. I think is a place where you know, let's say, you're brand new, you're in your first week of ERP consulting. You know you literally know nothing about what you're supposed to do but you're being presented as an expert. You know, I think taking notes is valuable because, one, you're providing you know, you're on this meeting, you're sort of providing value to the group, you can be the one that sends the notes. And then every you know on the customer side they sell great. He sends the notes, yeah, he knows, he knows what's going on. But then, two, you get to review your own notes and you say, oh, I don't understand this point. What was that? Right? And all the you know it's Donald Rumsfeld, right, the unknown, unknowns. You get to say, oh, this is the thing that I didn't know. And now I know that I didn't know that and so I can figure out, chase down that. So I had. You know, it's 10 things. But it's sort of about how do you build that initial knowledge and how do you make a space for yourself, both as a consultant and then how do you sort of get known within your organization and things like that. I like it.

Mark Smith: 19:07
I like it, the practical nature of it, right, something like taking notes. That shows that you're one, you're actively listening, and then I love the fact that, if you're the one that sends it out, you've now created these connections with all these people. That is building trust in your ability to execute right from the get go, and it's something so subtle.

Josh Knox: 19:29
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 19:31
Very good, very good, tell us, tell me about other kind of soft skills that new consultants need to have. And also, where does industry verticalization come into play? Like, if you look at the? You know, if you look at ERP, erp comes a massive spectrum right Of industries and no one ERP is the same as another, you know. Then you're seeing these days organizations wanting to move away from there. They're really tailored processes to what are standard ways of doing these Rather than the. The, the hodgepodge might have developed over time as the business evolved. I'm seeing this move to get to in the ERP side to go actually let's standardize on what this best practice looks, rather than just the way we do it. If the way we're doing it is not really adding material advantage to the business. How do you? You know so where does industry come in? Where does where does focus from the tech stack? You know there's so many parts now in ERP, there's so many focus areas. How does a new consultant really develop their tech skills but also their industry skills and also their what a better term soft skills, their skills of human interaction, of building trust, of constantly learning, of of confidence in, in their position on a project?

Josh Knox: 21:12
Oh, fantastic series of questions. Right, to take soft skills. I think it's. In some ways it's it's hard to develop soft skills because some of soft skills is just who you are. You know you're developing soft skills is polishing those edges. But, right, I'm, I'm an an active, attentive listener in my marriage and that translates I am also in that active, attentive listener, right, professionally, and and I think it'd be hard for me to have you know, fantastic soft skills professionally and then terrible soft skills in my personal life. So I think that's that's probably just a part of us. It's all growing and evolving as human beings. Right, it's just getting better, better soft skills. One thing that's interesting within that is and I think a thing I always struggled with is is getting feedback on your soft skills, and I don't know if you you have any suggestions there, but that's a thing, because you know I might have a meeting and think I did a great meeting and I sent out my notes and everybody's happy and I feel like we, all you know, did a great thing and and maybe I even moved the project along a great deal. But if the customer's on the other side and they didn't walk away with that same impression, right, you know something's breaking down there, but it's it's hard to get that feedback from the other side and I don't I don't have a solution for that. I'm just raising that. Have you had thoughts on that, mark, about even you know? How do you, how do you really know that you're succeeding at your soft skills, right, yeah?

Mark Smith: 23:00
If you've got a wing person right in the room that that is a trusted, maybe more seasoned, you've got that ability to go back and also then open ended questions. Is anything I missed, you know, in those notes? Or that follow up Is anything I missed? Do you think we're aligned? You know, answering those questions that are not you know that really elicit them, coming back and feeling that they are contributing again and perhaps highlighting blind spots.

Josh Knox: 23:27
But yeah, meta metathop skills right, the soft skills for the soft skills, right. So that's a great question, right and right, there's a whole industry of self-help books around that, but it's something that I'm I'm interested in general. Now, the verticalization, right, and the how do we write every and not every partner, but lots of partners are trying to say, right, I just do, you know this type of thing. And and some partners are having a lot of success with that right, and I come from Right, the first company that I worked with they said we are just, we basically just do professional services. And then, even within professional services, they started to drill down and say we just do, you know this segment of professional services. And they, they've had a lot of success doing that. And so I I think everyone's doing it, probably for for two reasons what right one is? You say, oh, if we can just do the same type of Implementation over and over, we're gonna get better at that, just like you would, you know, working on an assembly line. And and also, of course, as you drill down, you say this is our niche. Other partners are gonna say, oh, okay, well, I guess that's your niche. I don't want to compete with you in that niche I'm gonna build. Build this is my niche, so it's it's a good business strategy. And then, as a consultant, right, you're coming into this and, and you know, if you start working for any of these, these implementation partners, part of your job is just to become an expert in in the industry in general and then understand the specific problems that customers in your industry have, right with ERP, or with reporting, or with with their, their financial closes. Right, everyone had. You know what did Tolstoy say? Right, you know, happy families are all the same and no, yeah, and unhappy families are all unhappy in their own ways. But, right, you'll still have trends within within each niche. So I think, as a general point, it probably helps to become an industry expert, maybe even before you are a, you know, a specific ERP expert, but maybe it's a chicken and egg problem, I don't know. As a consultant, though, I think it's really important for you not to just have Expertise, let's say, within your industry. But really you need granular expertise and I, within some specific facet of of your ERP. Take, you know, if I take finance and operations as an example, you know, maybe you get really good at just like the, the Excel connector or data migration, or you know the, the collections suite, right, these are things that are much more specific than saying, oh, I do all of a are. You know, you know the ins and outs and the things that can break of this. You know, it's very specific feature and I I see that as as incredible value add because not just because, right, you, you build expertise in that thing which is helpful to your customers, but you can become known inside your organization as I am the expert on, you know, financial reporting or whatever that thing might be. It can be very valuable to, to sort of become a Beacon of light Around some given topic. And, as other people say, oh, I have a problem with that, they might say, oh, you know, josh, josh knows about that, mark knows about that. That can become very helpful. So, yeah, so it's not just about industry specific knowledge, but it's about knowledge within your specific product. You know, I was really Surprised and in an honor to be selected as a, as an MVP, this year, but in a lot of ways I really do still feel like a fraud, you know, because I I'm a finance and operations Functional consultant, but you know, I've never done trade and logistics stuff, I've only done a limited amount of, let's say, manufacturing stuff. All of my stuff has been within finance and all of my finance stuff is really focused on on AR and AP and data migration efforts and you know they're just. There are sort of just Distinct places where I have a lot of deep knowledge and there's just there's so much, right, no one. It's too big for any one person to be the expert in everything. Hey, thanks for listening.

Mark Smith: 28:04
I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ 365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out, buy me a coffee. Comm Ford slash NZ 365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time you.