#1 A Long Fluid Career
Despite all of the back of house disfunction the team knows that they are there to serve the customer and to do so in a manner that creates an exceptional experience for the customer. Our first podcast guest talks about how he started working in a number of Toronto’s best restaurants in the late 1980s and ‘90s. In my interview with Jesse Duggan he talks about how his years serving prepared him to become an entrepreneur and strangely end up leading his software as service company Fluid Mobility focusing on securing devices, and protecting assets and people. Now firmly middle aged, Jesse speaks honestly about honing his programming chops in the early days of the dotcom boom. That even after graduating as a programmer he felt like a fraud as he struggled to take his school learnings and get up to speed on the challenges of programming in the workplace. What his older self knows now is that there is a fair amount of learning on the job at the start of one’s career, and only so much that education can prepare you for.
What’s the connector though between serving in a restaurant and serving a client? Jesse says working in restaurants helped provide him with the confidence to speak with customers. That prior to this he was terrified to speak, outside of his circle of friends, but he soon learned that in a restaurant he was performing and therefore needed to put on a performance to read the table and befriend the customer. This skill was crucial to helping him years later as he built his software company. One key is that Jesse genuinely likes people. Today, Jesse who has a lifelong appreciation for food, as a result of years in fine dining, often weaves food into conversations with his clients in order to establish a connection.
Fluid had its share of challenges getting off the ground. In the early days of running his company Jesse learned the hard way how difficult it is to raise funds, a common problem for early stage organizations and a factor in slowing the growth and development of his company. Years later, Jesse doesn’t see himself a coder anymore but again from his early days of serving he is perhaps Fluid’s greatest asset in promoting and selling the company’s services and working with his resell channel partners.
Despite all the challenges that Jesse faced in establishing his company he has a lot compassion for the challenges that young people have today. He recognizes that young people often struggle in getting launched in careers today and that he once working they face additional challenges that Gen X didn’t including the high cost of daily living including housing in cities such as Toronto.
For more on my interview with Jesse listen to the podcast or visit https://fluid-mobility.com/ to learn more about its range of services.
