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(orchestral music) (orchestral music) - To Business Forward.

I'm your host, Matt George.

Good friend of mine joining me tonight, Dr. Shane Needham.

Dr. Needham is the president and CEO and founder of Veloxity Labs here in Peoria.

Great guy.

Welcome.

- Thank you very much.

What an honor.

And I just appreciate you having me on your show again.

- Well, yeah, I mean, I don't have too many people twice on the show and I'm starting to sit here and go, there's a lot of shows that I've done in the past that I sit here and go, "That show could have been 60 minutes or 90 minutes," and yours was one of them.

So, welcome back.

- Oh my goodness.

What an honor.

I didn't know that so thanks for having me a second time.

- Yeah, it was funny because when we finished the first time it was over a year ago when we finished that show, I said, "Let's see what it looks like and where you're at with the progression of your business."

And then let's get an update on the business.

So, let's just before we get to that, you fly in.

I mean, you love Peoria, which I just love, you know that, but you fly in from Idaho, is that correct?

- That's correct, yeah.

- So you still live there full-time?

- I still live there full-time, yeah.

I still have two boys in high school.

- [Matt] Okay, so we haven't convinced you to move to Middle Illinois yet?

- Not yet.

Not yet.

But yeah, it's always a pleasure to come here.

I love the Midwest.

I think it's really primed based upon geopolitics and some of the things that are happening in business around the world and the nation.

It's really primed for growth in the future.

And we're seeing that at Veloxity that we're just really, really appreciative of what the city has done for us, the welcoming arms we've got from everybody and just the growth that we can have.

- Well, what I like about what you just said is we talk to a lot of CEOs, a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of them are from here or just from Central Illinois or from Illinois, but you're not from here.

So from an outsider's look or an outsider's point of view, to hear that it makes a lot of things feel better in a lot of different ways because you see so many states and so many big cities, Chicago being one of them, where there's a negative migration of people leaving those cities.

And we need people to come to our cities, right?

- Yeah, well that's our plan as we grow.

I mean, when we were on this show last year about this time, we had actually had two people at Veloxity and now we have 16 people on our org chart.

And we are just crushing our goals.

It is very exciting that we're actually getting people from around the world that are working for us.

We have somebody moving from Canada in May.

We had somebody that moved from Philadelphia area.

We've had several move from the St. Louis area and it's just been incredible.

And some of those are from our competitors 'cause we've built such a good culture with a good vision.

And one of the things I wanted as our corporate identity is to have fun.

We should have fun at work.

And we are absolutely doing that.

- Yeah.

I mean, think about what you're saying.

You're living in Canada and you're telling your spouse or whoever, "I'm leaving, I'm moving to Peoria, Illinois."

And people may think, "Well, why in the heck would you even do that?"

But business runs so many things and there's so many new opportunities.

And we talked about this really at a breakfast one morning about when you think about all of the new businesses that are coming post-Covid because you could take the negative spin and say there's a lot of entrepreneurs that have lost their businesses and obviously we feel bad there, but just like Veloxity, there's new opportunities out there and that's what's fun about it.

- Absolutely.

Well, I think about that post-Covid, post-pandemic, whatever we wanna call it and I think if I was going to be a remote CEO from Idaho three or four years ago, I don't think somebody even thought that that's possible.

- That's a good point.

- But it is possible now.

Yesterday, I didn't get on a flight until 2:30 p.m. out of where I was coming from and I had already six meetings in the morning virtually.

And so, I still had a full day.

I start my day at 6:00 a.m. Pacific time, and that's the times when I'm in Idaho.

And then I was done by about noon, drove to the airport and hopped on a flight.

And so, I don't think three years ago pre-Covid we could have even realized that was possible.

But I actually think it's actually in some ways, number one, I have really a good team for lab ops with Mitch and Colt, my whole team that are part of the co-founding team running laboratory operations in Peoria, Illinois.

Wouldn't be possible without them.

And just kudos to them.

But to think about what I actually can do remotely is incredible.

And I mean, here today 'cause we have a big potential client coming in and I'm super excited that I can come in, meet with them, and then fly out again, fly back home tomorrow and be with family.

- Isn't that crazy?

- It's crazy.

- And if you think about it too, there was other ways.

There were Skype and all that stuff pre-Covid, but now, Zoom wasn't even popular four years ago.

- No.

(giggles) - And Microsoft Teams.

- Does Skype even exist anymore?

- I don't think so, but maybe.

- I know what you're saying.

- Who uses it?

Nobody.

And my point is I had a session last week, I was business coaching and she was in Abu Dhabi and you're sitting there going.

- That's crazy.

- Four or five years ago, that's not even, maybe it's possible, but it wasn't on my mind.

- Exactly, yeah.

- You know what I mean?

So I wanna kind of just before we get back to Veloxity, I wanna talk about you for a sec because I was thinking, "Do I bring this up?"

But I actually think it's an important piece to you and your mental state is you have a unique hobby and you take your health and you're working out very seriously.

You're a bodybuilder too.

And I found that impressive.

And the reason why is not because of the way you look, but it's really that process that you put in.

Those habits that you put in.

And I kind of related those habits.

I was telling a story to some of the people that I've been coaching in business.

I use you as an example as a story is when you have that mental habit of saying, "I'm going to eat this, I'm going to do this, and I'm getting up at 5:30 every morning, and heep-boop-boop," and it's hard.

- It's hard.

And it's funny you say that, Matt, and I really enjoyed that our friendship has developed over the last year or so because when you invited me on your show just little over a week ago, I thought, "I wanna talk about habits."

Because I knew you were gonna talk about some personal things.

And I just realized that ever since I was a teen, I've actually had a lot of habits.

I'm very disciplined on this is what I'm gonna do at this time.

I'm a planner.

I wake up, I do this, then I do this, then I do this.

And bodybuilding has been great for that because you have to have habits.

So, I wake up at 4:30 in the morning.

I mean, I just have habits.

Then I go on a 30 minute walk, and then I do some Tabata exercises.

Now, I kind of change my exercises throughout the year, but then I may eat something and then I take my vitamin routine.

And then I actually, I'm a faithful guy.

I believe in God and Jesus Christ.

And so then I read my Bible and then I read the Wall Street Journal.

Then I read the Peoria Journal Star electronically and then I usually read a self-help book and or a business book.

And this is all in over an hour period, hour and a half.

Depend on business needs and if I have calls or whatnot, it might change, but that starts my day out right.

And if I don't do that, oh man, I get kind of flipped out a little bit.

Those habits and then I work out in the afternoon.

That's a non-negotiable.

I have my business routine and then I work out and then I even during the day because I work remotely most of the time I can cook my meals, eat my meals.

But bodybuilding requires a tremendous amount of discipline.

And anything to be successful requires that discipline and a planning and habits.

I'm an obsessive guy.

Some people call me excessive.

I call myself dedicated and disciplined.

Some people call it obsessive, but you could take that to an extreme right, Matt?

That if I'm an excessive guy, so bad habits could probably come as a big downfall to me.

I could probably get addicted to a lot of things.

- There's no doubt.

I mean, that's why to stay that positive piece equals this.

- Exactly.

- My next line is working out helps you with your mental game into the positivity of the bottom line.

- Absolutely.

(giggles) It starts my day out right.

And especially, it keeps me from any bad habits.

From too much screen time.

When I'm ever alone, I don't care if I'm in a hotel or home alone, I don't watch T.V.

I don't turn it on.

Just recently with my fiance, we can enjoy some alone time with a TV and relax and laugh and stuff like that.

But other bad habits that sometimes happen at night, I don't do them because I haven't scheduled that time in my process.

But you're exactly right.

I mean, life is a competition.

And I don't mean sacrifice everything to win, but being a national champion bodybuilder in December of 2021 and competitive bodybuilder before that and power lifter and so on and so forth, business is the same.

It's a competition.

- That's exactly right.

- You look at your competitors, you say, "Here's what we need to do better than them.

Here's what our daily habits have to be in order to succeed."

And I think Jim Collins of the book "Good to Great" and several others says something like the 20 mile march.

Every day, one step at a time.

- That's exactly right.

- Every day.

And you get that flywheel moving and that's what's been great to watch Veloxity succeed is that we have a great flywheel and everybody's just doing the 20 mile march of continual improvement every single day.

- So let's talk about Veloxity for a minute because I think we've talked about this before, but what does bioanalysis mean again?

- Yeah, so bioanalysis.

We are what they call in our industry a contract research organization that focuses on bioanalysis.

Now, before we get to bioanalysis, a contract research organization is an organization in the biotech and pharmaceutical realm where those companies from around the world contract with us to do bioanalysis.

And bioanalysis is the measurements of therapeutics, drugs, and their metabolites or even biomarkers.

And that could be brain biomarkers or it could be blood glucose.

I'm trying to-- - Broad example, I get it.

- Layman terms, yeah, but those are biomarkers.

And we use expensive capital equipment called high performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry instruments to then do that bioanalysis.

And then we have a lot of PhDs on our staff.

So we have highly trained technical staff and high capital equipment to do that type of work in bioanalysis.

And (giggles) we are actually getting business from around the world, including other countries as well and inquiries.

It is awesome.

- And so when you hear the term big pharma, you're talking about Eli Lilly, companies like that, right?

- Yeah, exactly.

I mean, big pharma would be maybe, it's kind of a subjective term.

But a Novartis, a Pfizer, an Eli Lilly, an Indianapolis example.

- Yeah, okay.

And you hear terms all the time and then you use those big words.

I mean, they're microscopes sometimes, right?

Just simple.

- Microscopes for what?

- For what you're looking at.

- A lot of people think that.

That's kind of a biology thing.

We're mostly chemists, so we don't use a lot of microscopes.

But we'll use a lot of chemicals to do extractions, pipettes, centrifuges, homogenizers to homogenize tissues.

- [Matt] What's a centrifuge as an example?

- A centrifuge is something that spins really, really fast.

There's a density gradient, so it puts heavier particles in the bottom and then lighter things at the top.

And bioanalysis is the measurement of drugs, metabolites, therapeutics from biological fluids and matrices.

And those biological fluids could be blood, could be CSF or synovial fluid.

It could be hair, it could be skin.

It could be in other species like rats and whatnot.

Liver, eyes for ocular type diseases and so on and so forth.

- I gotcha.

- It can be any type of biological matrix.

- What I just figured out just now is I couldn't work for Veloxity Labs.

(laughs) - [Shane] And why is that?

(giggles) - Because you have scientists there that are doing some great things.

I know that.

- Yeah, we have scientists and we also have a lot of support roles as well.

- Yeah, I know.

I'm just teasing.

So, last September, I get a call from you.

I love this.

"Hey Matt, we're up for an award for Turner Center for Entrepreneurship at Bradley.

We're having an awards banquet and I would love for you to be my guest."

And I walk in this room with all of these great companies and all these great visionaries and I sit down with you and they announce Veloxity Labs as the winner of Startup of the Year.

Now, you have got to sit there and think to yourself, "That is about as cool as it gets," in a community that embraces a company like that.

I mean, I saw the look on your face, I see it now.

But you even had me go up there and I got to be part of some of the pictures and everything and it was like one of the coolest moments to watch a friend be able to do that.

- Oh my goodness.

Well, thank you very much.

And that's what I really, really enjoy about our relationship is I like people to succeed and I know you like people to succeed and that's why I wanted you to be a guest there.

I said this at the startup award event and I'm just grateful to Bradley and the Turner Center and all that and the city of Peoria, all the support that we've received here, but we don't chase awards.

But what I talked about at the acceptance speech is we chase excellence.

And we chase continual improvement every single day.

Alongside that, what happens?

You get awards and that's really, really cool.

But if you chase excellence, I don't chase trophies even in my life, right?

I wanna win national championships.

I wanna win state championships and power lifting, body building and all these different things, but it's not the medal that matters to me, it's the process.

And that's what's been really cool to see how our lab came together and there was lots of risk involved and some people were hesitant to get on board early on and now they're just like, "This is great, you guys."

- Now they wanna be a part of it.

- Exactly.

(both laughing) And what's been really cool to see that is startup award is we're actually still a small player in our industry, Matt.

But what we've actually watched, we have innovated many different things.

I'm not gonna talk about it.

And now our competitors are imitating us.

- [Matt] Well, there's nothing better.

- That is like chink.

- That's flattery.

- It is.

- It is.

Let's go there then.

Let's talk about that.

So, you're still looking at expanding.

So when someone says on a business like this on a startup that you wanna scale.

Scaling is two to 16 employees, that's a piece of it.

But is the opportunity as far as you can take it as long as the business is there?

I mean, how do you find the people in this scaling process to be able to come in?

Whether they're scientists or lab or whether they're frontline and office, whatever it may be.

But how do you find these people?

Because going from two to 16 and grabbing people from St. Louis and Canada is not easy.

- Yeah, that's a very good question.

So how do we scale?

So number one, we developed systems and put those in place that were truly scalable.

So we had zero legacy systems, we're all paperless.

And a lot of our competitors are not, they have these legacy systems that are 20 or 30 years old and they have legacy people and they have these mindsets that are 20 and 30 years old as well.

That have old mindsets.

Well, we wanted to be scalable to say these systems can be for 2023 and beyond.

So, our systems are scalable.

And as the CEO and being the leader, I wanted to really put a vision in place and a culture in place where people wanted to work for us.

So, I can say this.

It's very, very rare actually.

There had been a few people of that 16, one or two maybe, that we've actually advertised positions for.

Usually I get notes on LinkedIn.

Usually in one of our other departments, one of our VPs or something, somebody reached out to them and says, "Hey, I wanna work for you guys.

You guys are doing some cool stuff."

And again, it's flattering.

- Yeah, it is flattering.

- That means that we've put the right vision and culture in place where people wanna work for us.

And so, we still get that.

And there's some of them that are very high level, we're like, "We're not ready for you yet.

Can you wait a year or two?"

They're like, "Yeah, we'll wait."

(laughs) And so, we wanna always have that culture.

So, the pie is this big in our industry.

We have a slice like this.

So our growth rate can be huge.

Our growth rate, the goals that I've set early on even last year were 50% growth a year for the next five years.

And we're already achieving that.

We're actually crushing that.

We have to reset goals all the time.

So it's good.

- That's a good thing.

- It is a good thing.

- So let's go back to mindset and leadership for a second.

So, let's talk about a few things.

Mentorship.

So, Shane reaches out to one of your partners, reaches out to you on LinkedIn and next thing you know you're in Peoria, Illinois with a business.

- Yeah, so Mitch.

- Yeah, Mitch.

- Yeah, absolutely.

This was summer of 2021.

- Sorry, yeah.

- Mitch, he's my business partner now.

I had some really good mentors early on in my career and I sought them out.

They were always usually older than me.

Well, they were older than me.

Sometimes almost father type age to me.

And I just saw how important that was for me.

So I was, instead of on Friday and Saturday nights partying like a lot of my colleagues, I was thinking about mentorship and studying and so on and so forth.

- Working out.

- Working out for good or bad.

That's just what it was.

And it's worked out really well for me.

But I was I think looking out for more wise people and mature people.

So I thought they were so important to me, I wanna give to other people like that too.

So, people reached out to me on LinkedIn.

Students call me all the time and have them help me with life goals and so on and so forth.

And so, Mitch reached out to me on LinkedIn and it's like, oh my goodness.

And he says, "Can we talk?"

I'm like, "Sure."

I had no idea what he was gonna say.

And then I'm like, "Set up a Zoom meeting."

And so he sets up this Zoom call and labels it Bioanalytical Lab Startup.

I'm like, "This should be interesting."

Because I've done that before, right?

And we just had this great conversation.

You're a good people reader too.

And I have enough emotional intelligence and enough experience now.

Within five seconds-- - You knew.

- I knew I was gonna go into business with Mitch.

- Well, he's a sharp guy.

- He's a sharp guy, intelligent.

He has a PhD, he has the qualifications, and he's got great communication and business skills.

I could just see it.

And so anyway, I knew within five seconds, but it was towards the end where I'm like, "Well, how you gonna fund this thing?"

He's like, "Well, I'm gonna go to a bank, get an SBA loan."

He's like, "What do you think of that?"

I'm like, "Well, you can do that.

I don't think they're gonna give you enough money and it's gonna take too long."

And I said, "But do you want a business partner?"

And he's like, "Well, who?"

I said, "Me."

And he says, "Yes."

The rest is history.

- Aand the rest is history.

- That relationship has just fostered and developed even further.

And so it's been great.

- I mean, you've never said this, but this is how I look at it.

You let somebody ride on your coattails because of your experience, you become partners.

But in that partnership, there's a mentorship.

But here's what's interesting about what I've noticed as I've gotten older.

It's a mentorship that goes both ways because you're actually learning from somebody who is, I don't know how much younger he is, but let's just say 20 years.

- [Shane] It's about right.

- And you're learning this whole new set of now how they look at leadership.

- Absolutely.

- But that helps in hiring and scaling.

- Oh, yeah.

- And I think that's what's really cool about your relationship with him.

So, let's talk about team building for a second.

You have to build a team and a culture from afar, but at the same time, you lay out these building blocks and these expectations.

How do you do that?

- Well, that's a good question.

And so when I think about motivating teams and building teams, I'm actually in the process of writing a book on this.

And so, and I'll get to that in a minute.

But what happened Matt, is when I was 10, 15 years ago, I can't remember exact timing, I started coaching my oldest son in wrestling.

I have a wrestling background.

I think it's a great sport for individual leadership, individual accountability, responsibility, discipline, all the things that you need in life.

And anyway, I mean, I was only there for like three months.

And I think I've been given a gift in leadership and I'll just say ever since I was a teen, I think you have similar stories.

Whenever I've been offered a job, they've always somehow promoted me and wanted me to manage, wanted me to lead, wanted me to run the place, whatever.

Well, there's all these assistant coaches that are helping out and whatnot.

They've been helping out for years.

And the head coach comes to me after about a month of me being there and he says, "Do you wanna take over this program?"

I'm like, "The wrestling program?

Why me?"

And he's like, "I could just see it in you."

I'm like, "Okay."

So, at that point, there were about 16 kids in that program.

And then I just started watching like okay, why are kids enjoying it?

Why are parenting enjoying it?

Who's the ideal client?

Why are kids quitting?

What's the attrition rate?

What do I need to do?

And that helped me so much.

I built that program in less than five years from 16 kids to over 100.

It became the most popular youth sport in Moscow, Idaho.

And it was great.

I had to build a facility with my own money just to support that.

But what it caused me to think is like, wait a minute.

When I started reading these sports books and motivation books and how to build these sports teams, I'm like, "These concepts are all the same in business.

I can apply it to the businesses that I own."

- [Matt] That's exactly right.

- So I had these books and I still have them dogeared, I still do.

Highlights in the books.

I didn't care.

I'm just learning stuff.

I've got all these different books.

I'm like, "Okay, so there's this, there's this, there's this."

I couldn't remember all these things.

I'm like, "I gotta come up with an acronym so I can remember this."

So I came up with an acronym and the acronym is FACT.

And Veloxity and I'll get to that in a minute, Veloxity was the first organization where I'd put all these FACTs, these principles together and applied it.

And it has worked tremendously.

And let me give you what FACT is.

FACT, so it's F-A-C-T, I've trademarked that.

I'm in the process of writing a book, but it's called "The Proven Principles to Build and Motivate Teams".

I don't care if you're a business, political organization, nonprofit.

- Anything.

- Or a sports team, it works.

And so FACT.

The F is fun and fulfilling.

You have to have fun.

Now, if you have a teenager, their idea of fun is looking at a screen all day or going to the skate park and doing things they shouldn't.

So it's gotta be fulfilling.

Fun in the moment is not as fun as fun that's fulfilling that you're gonna look back on 20 years later and say, "I enjoyed that."

So, be fulfilling.

Autonomy.

This is a big one with Mitch, for example.

Hire the right people, put the right people on the bus, put them in the right seats, let them do their thing.

Even for a five year old wrestler, let them choose the game.

For a high school wrestler, let him run practice once a week.

Competence.

As a leader, you should make your people feel competent.

That gives them self-esteem, that gives them self confidence, they're gonna feel good.

- And what's T?

- Team.

- Love it.

- Everybody wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

So, those FACTs have applied at Veloxity.

And I apply them all the time in all leadership positions.

And I wanna be the leader who makes other leaders.

- Well, thank you for coming on.

That was another fast 30 minutes, but Shane Needham, Veloxity Labs.

Good friend.

Thank you.

I'm Matt George and this is another episode of Business Forward.

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