HoldCo Strategy Sessions

Mike Shoss (00:00.644)
Good morning and welcome to everyone. This is the very first episode of Hold Co strategy sessions. I'm your host, Mike Shoss I'm here to take you on a journey through the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Each week, generally on a Friday, we will dive into the achievement challenges and learnings from my companies. So that's ShossX which is my major holding company, which is why it's called Hold Co strategy sessions, as well as Milton Innovation, Epilogue, and LiteWorker.

This podcast is more than just a business update, it's a legacy for future generations, a source of inspiration for anyone to take action in their own life. So let's just get started. So first of all, I'm Mike Shoss, seasoned entrepreneur based in Milton, Ontario. I just spent three years out of a Silicon Valley company and before that, actually, let's dive a little deeper. Silicon Valley, I spent three years building out a company called Firework.

From there I led the pivot from business into from SAS. Sorry from publishing into SAS I led the pivot into live streaming as well as ecommerce and more importantly into AI I've spent majority of my life in startups in some capacity whether it's running my own businesses Like I am doing today or working and consulting on startups. I've also worked at fortune one companies or fortune 50 however, you want to phrase it?

to all the way up to single person startups. So well versed across what works and what doesn't work and by trend or by on paper, I am a senior product manager or a product manager, or at least senior and director was my last titles. So let's get started into the actual updates across the board. I'm gonna break these out and probably to a couple of sections. One of those personal reflections, the next one's challenges and setbacks, just general next steps and some closing thoughts.

This is going to morph and take shape as it goes so I appreciate you being the first listeners here and you know dealing with the learning and the test I've called this episode beta test because like any good product you should put it out and tweak and refine as you go So personal reflections so this is going to be a summary of kind of what's in my notebook if you're watching the video podcast I take notes in a actual physical notebook

Mike Shoss (02:12.516)
And this is for me to be able to remember what is going on, not only later on after a meeting or a conversation or a thought has ended, but to remember better during that moment. You have a better retention overall, and you write something down instead of typing it. So I've made the transition from actual, you know, keyboard taking notes, which I still do, to actual pen and paper. And I go through a stack of these, trying to make sure that I'm up to date at all times and try to make sure that I can go back and reference. And I will say that this has been very, very helpful over the past little while.

So let's start off. ShossX Nothing's really happened on that front. It's a hold co overall. It sits here. It is my major hold call. It's a personal hold call. So basically I am the full owner of this organization. No major updates across the board for this one. It is sitting there. Everything's kind of up and running. If you want to learn about hold codes and things like that, more than happy to do a session on that and about why I structured my organization using air quotes.

in this way. Lots of pros, lots of cons. Lots of pros, not a lot of cons, but a little bit of complexity and overhead. This week on the Epilogue side, which is my consulting company, not a whole bunch of updates. I am trying to close two new clients across the board. One of them is in a space that I come directly from and one of them is just a, let's just say a coworker that I've been trying to work with over the past little while and I've been, you know,

going through and working with both of them very closely. And I'm trying to close both of them now. Don't want to give too many details about that. I will give a little bit more details and a little bit more of a plug once we're actually a little bit closer to actually being finalized and things like that. But on that side, from the consulting point of view from Epilogue, that is really it. Epilogue also sits under kind of a couple other different branches. One of them is...

for the kind of the coaching side. So I have a product manager or aspiring product manager, let's put it like that, who wants to come in and learn about product management. And we've been going through and we've been doing a whole bunch of courses and training. And that is something that I offer to be able to help people get into product management because there is no steady clear path, right? You don't go to school to be a product manager. You don't go and you get your MBA, but there's something about being said about being punched in the mouth, because everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

Mike Shoss (04:25.708)
And school only teaches you one thing up to a certain point. So I try to come in and teach them what it's like to be in the real world and more importantly for them to go get their hands dirty in product management. The second side is I also have an advisory company that I'm working with who's looking to enter, do a round of fundraising. So I've been in a lot of time about going through and refining their decks and being able to go through and actually put all of these pieces together to be able to help them craft their story.

When you're raising a very early seed round series a round, it's really about the story and it's really about the team So making sure that the story is refined making sure you're understanding the problem in the solution and why you were the only person who can do this solution and what are your Traction metrics and things like that Also making sure that the decks are nice and concise I was in a pitch meeting. I'm a part of angel one, which is a an angel investing group here in the Halton Canada, Ontario region

And I've sat on some pitch meetings that have been there and it's really around, you know, 45 minutes of, you know, your pitch deck. And I have no idea what you do by the end of it. So how do you take the story? How do you take that information? How do you craft it out into a very simple? Here's the problem. Here's the solution. Here's why were you uniquely positioned? So helping a company go through through an advisory role right now through that. And I will announce that company. Actually, if you go to my LinkedIn, which will eat down below.

in the show notes, you can actually go and see who that company is. And right now we'll just skip over that, but helping them go raise their round to be able to go to market, be able to expand not only from the countries that they're in into new possible countries. So working closely with them. I do have a couple of meetings. This is being hosted on Monday. I do have a meeting this week to just talk to another client from the consulting side. So hopefully gonna add a couple of different pieces in and I will dive more into in later episodes into what my consulting company does and everything like that.

I'm just going through my notes here. I think from the consulting point of view, I think that's good overall I don't think there's any other major updates across the board I guess from a holding co kind of update across the board. I said I didn't have any I'm actually looking for a new accountant That is actually a little bit harder than I thought I thought kicking off the new year fighting accountant would be super easy a little bit more of a challenge than I thought that it was going to be so anyways, we've got a new accountant that we're looking for again to manage the finances over here Here's one of the cons of having a holding company. I

Mike Shoss (06:48.036)
Just the financial the overhead of having multiple different companies. If it was just one company overall This would be very easy. It'd be very easy to have very low overheads a little very low expenses, but hey, you know here we are So that is the update ShossX sex that is the update for Epilogue my consulting company Let's pop into light worker next so light worker for those who don't know are I guess no one knows so light worker is a AI consumer research company

that has a public web -facing site to be able to go through and gather that research. So what we are doing right now is we are gathering and reviewing all AI tools out there. The biggest problem is there are thousands of AI tools that are launched every single day. Most of them are not focusing on the consumer experience, and most of them don't have a problem that they're actually trying to solve. It's AI for the sake of AI. And at the end of the day, even if you do have a tool that sits within that realm to be able to actually solve a user problem, no one knows how to find it.

So we're in the middle of aggregating all of those tools. We are going to become the app store for AI tools. So super cool It's a super fun project between myself and my co -worker Who will be announced later on but we've been going at this now for a little while and we're seeing really really really good traction So the major updates are you know, we're adding new tools every day We've gone through our at 260 tools. I think right now we're going to be up to 750 by you know q2

Being able to add new tools all the time. Those are tools that are tools and reviewed tools Like those are all everything you get all of that not just a link to a outside tool that there's actually Who this is for what product does this fit under? Are you a product manager? Are you sales? What are the top 10 tools you need to know? And that's really what we're surfacing and that's really really intriguing So the biggest updates we're doing are one we're creating a whole bunch of content around these areas and around these

things that you need to know as a product manager, as sales, as XYZ. Here are the tools that you need to know about. And then on the backside, we're going through and we're looking at the data to be able to define industry trends and probably at some point, hopefully bring a product into market. But that's a later step. But the goal is to be able to actually bring products into market where we see a lot of search traffic, a lot of information, a lot of, let's just say, traffic that's coming in, but the users are not converting because it doesn't actually solve the problem. Again, AI for the sake of AI. So.

Mike Shoss (09:07.044)
We're in the middle of building out that full structure. We're seeing really, really good traction across the board. We have spent zero marketing dollars. We have spent zero time on kind of pushing out the message. We've all done just search engine optimization, organic growth, stuff like that. We're seeing very good numbers. So we've had a conversion. We've had a user who's gone through and bought a tool. We've had a couple of those to be able to click out, to be able to see what users information, but more importantly, we're gathering the data. We want to be able to be that data aggregating hub.

So we're launching a new site, hopefully the end of this week. So this is the week of the 15th. Watch. Week of the 15th, we're hopefully going to go through and launch our new site and then we're going to be doing a lot bigger marketing push for all of this content. Right now, if you go to lightworker .ai, the site is there, all the information is there, all the tools are there. But at the end of the day, we want to be able to say, hey, you know, here are the exact use cases. Here is, you know, here is the, if you're in sales, here's what it is. Right now, our site doesn't have that. Right now, it's just an aggregation with reviews of the tools overall.

So we're going to be expanding LiteWorker into TikTok. So we're doing that marketing program right now to figure out, hey, does this even make sense? Trying to learn best challenges or best practices, things like that, be able to go through and actually do that. We're going to be creating a lot more LinkedIn content, a lot more information around what we're doing. Again, AI is a big, scary topic to most people. It's one of those things that, you know, you think AI, you think innovation, you think it's this big thing. Right now, 25 % of jobs have had AI.

Replace a part of it or something like that Approximately and you know by 2030 it's going to be 75 percent So making sure that people feel comfortable with AI. AI isn't coming for your jobs The best analogy I like to use is if you're a marvel if you're a marvel fan, you'll get this and if not go look it up We're trying to make you iron man not vision and vision is a you know an AI humanoid A synthetic human where we're trying to make you iron man, which is like you the person are still the person you're just enhanced You're just that next level. So

We're trying to make sure that the resources and the information around AI is not scary. It's not this big thing that's scary that's going to replace your job. It's going to make you do your job better. So we're working on the content and the marketing strategy for that. That's one of the big things that we're going to be able to do. And then we're going to be able to go through and actually pump out some partnerships and some pieces like that and be able to provide user feedback into the system. So if you want to come.

Mike Shoss (11:30.42)
Pop on over to lightworker .ai. We have a mailing list. Feel free to go join the mailing list. We'll be tapping our subscribers to come be part of our beta programs, to be part of the early access, to be part of all these things, because we're doing really, really fun things. Again, this is very much a research -driven company and organization. We want to make sure that we are doing the best things that we're telling people to do.

Just some water for those listening in. So that is LiteWorker. On the Milton Innovation Front, so Milton Innovation is a community organization that we run. It involves myself to be able to run and organize meetups within the Milton area, which is part of Halton, which is part of Ontario, which is part of Canada for those who are listening, trying to gauge where this is. So we are just west of the GTA, Greater Toronto area for those, again, not familiar with the area.

And the goal is to be able to gather all the people that are within Milton or within tech and want to do innovation and be able to bring them out to meetings and have them contribute back and be able to get these people out of their house and more importantly serve their needs for what they need. So right now I'm working directly with the Town of Milton's economic development team to be able to go through and push this initiative to be able to lead this project in order to get people out. And we've done two or three events so far. We have another event.

If you're in the area, if you're in the GTA, January 31st, I will leave a link in the show notes for if you want to come and show up. We do one meetup a month. So right now we have one that's scheduled for January. We have one that's scheduled for February, which is a co -sponsored event between Milton Innovation and the region of Halton. So Halton Small Business. We have one in May, no March, sorry. We have one in March that is co -sponsored with or sponsored by someone that we can't talk about just yet, but that will be one of the updates that I give about.

Going through and doing that process and then one in April which is just a standalone event to just hosted by Milton innovation And that's the goal is to be able to kind of offer community to offer resources to these people who? Traditionally have had to commute out to other areas people understand that there's other people that are like them in the area And if you're thinking about you're in tech, you know You might think that all techs everywhere and especially if you come from a bigger if you're from Toronto if you're from kitchen or Waterloo

Mike Shoss (13:47.364)
Those are tech hubs. You can walk down the street, you can walk to the coffee shop and find someone in tech. That's very, very easy. In Milton, that doesn't really happen that much or in Halton. We don't have that deep of a hub and it's very easy for people to just stay home and work remotely or commute out to again, these greater regions or these greater areas. And my job is to be able to pull these people out and surface what they need, whether it's jobs, whether it's courses, whether it's learnings, whether it's speakers and be able to pull these people out and be able to deliver them value.

So the business model for this one is we work on two sides. We work with membership. Membership is something that we've pushed very much so far. We have three different tracks. We have, are you a startup? Are you looking to get a new job or are you looking to upgrade your skills in your job? And those are really, really the three. So, and they each have different tiers for depending on what you want. And by going through and becoming a member in this group, all of our meetups are free by the way, just.

Meetups are free. That will always be free to every single member that's open to the public. Feel free to come in and pop in. And then we offer additional courses or classes or speakers or events to the specific niche down, depending on what you want to be able to try and learn. So we're going through and doing different topics for each month. January is going to be around innovation. This will be really the kind of the kickoff semester or kind of the kickoff course or kickoff meetup to be able to do that. So we also host all of our

Streams live so if you can't make it to a meetup we host all the things live You have to be a member or you might you might have to be a member by the time this goes live a bit better time The meetup goes live to be able to view it. So you might have to go and create a login But we also host all of them on YouTube after the after the event has happened We also hopefully live stream all of them out to the other prospective platforms and then more importantly We also have a podcast to be able to retain all that information. So I

So that's the one side of the organization, kind of the membership side and the other side is the sponsorship side. So let's jump into what's been going on over the past little while here. So currently working on a sponsorship with a large organization who's very interested in kind of getting their foot into the Milton innovation piece overall. And it is closed within reason by the time this goes live. Generally, I do these on Fridays and this was not closed then. So I will be doing these on Friday. That will be when when these go live will be recorded ShossX.

Mike Shoss (16:10.244)
and posted on Fridays. But so we are in the final details crossing some T's, dotting some I's, stuff like that, for be able to announce this. And this is one of those things that's been going on. One of the things that has been going on for the past, you know, half month, maybe a month now, to be able to try and get this large sponsor on board, to be able to come be part of the community. And they've been very, very excited about what Milton Innovation is bringing to the table about this area that was like very underserved, if from a technology point of view, being able to

bring these people out and bring them together. So we take the sponsorships and we either they provide either money or spaces or speakers or something like that to be able to contribute back to the community. And one of the things I promised to the community as I was building this out was I was never going to take on a sponsor that didn't directly impact the community in a positive way. So very much anyone that we bring on has to give something back to the community, show up at these events, be valuable.

deliver XYZ. So very, very excited to announce that specific partnership that it will be announced probably this time next week. So the next kind of podcast that comes out. If you want to follow along, there's a Facebook group and a LinkedIn group. I'll post it in the show notes to make sure that you go and follow these groups, come and join. Again, if you're local in the area, please come out to these events. I'm more than willing to give some high fives. And that's really the updates that are there.

I've done the updates for when the next events are overall. That's been fun and exciting. We are in the middle of making sure that everything is kind of smoothed out. Again, we're talking to multiple different venues. We got, or I have a couple of different other partnerships that are in the works. There are two large schools that are going into the Milton region. I won't mention them by name, but if you do 15 minutes worth of Googling, you'll be able to find out who they are.

and have them come on board and be able to work alongside with us. Both schools are offering very tech -focused businesses or programs. Both of them want to be involved in the innovation, so very, very, very good direct fit. I think that we can provide them a lot of value as well and help them get their brand name out before the schools are actually built to be able to get that foothold into the community overall. So those are the updates really across the board.

Mike Shoss (18:28.382)
So Shoss X has been going well and the three organizations under it are trending in the right direction The companies that I'm help advising are you know trending and growing and looking to raise a series eight, which is or sorry seed ramp, which is very very intriguing Oh from a lightworker perspective I'd forgot to mention this as well as we are in the middle of putting together a deck for fundraising If you have any interest about investing in light light worker, I'm more than happy to have that conversation again AI focused research company. So that's that

As we expand into the kind of the next phase here challenges Challenges for just money right now is one of the biggest issues right the economy is bad People are tightening their budgets people are you know? Your brands are not looking to you know spend spend all the money that they could before especially pre -pandemic or very very early pandemic you know money was flowing being part of

the Silicon Valley company, we raised a very large amount of money at the peak of the market. So I know I'm very aware about how money used to flow and it doesn't flow like that right now. So we're trying to work within budgets and try to be flexible on either whether it's the consulting side, whether it's different budgets, different hours. On the Milton innovation side, if we're looking at it from brands want to come on board but need something else different than money to be able to pay, so a different kind of value.

if that makes sense. So instead of providing, you know, just money upfront and a logo placement, be able to provide, let's just say speakers or a venue or courses specific to the program overall. But really that's the biggest kind of challenge that we're running into across the organization, but obviously across Canada as well. And that's really what we're looking at as the biggest challenges. Next steps and goals overall. We're looking at obviously...

from let's just run through it. ShossX will continue to sit there and grow and continue to do what it does as a holding company. Milton Innovation will continue to grow and push and be expanded to the market, be able to get hundreds of people out together overall. I'm hoping to again run one meetup a month. We're also hoping to run hackathons. That will be a kind of a great kind of addition into our repertoire. Also running courses. We are in the middle of talking about a data science course, which is super, super intriguing.

Mike Shoss (20:44.964)
That's one of the pieces of feedback that we heard was, you know, let's get some data science in here. Let's get some product management learnings. Let's go learn these things so people can upgrade and learn their skills and kind of upgrade their jobs or upgrade, you know, either into a new job or update upgrade their current job. So those are things that we're hearing. LiteWorker is going to continue to build out our new site and that will hopefully be launched very, very soon. And then we're hoping to move into more partnerships with AI companies and again, getting more research in.

That'll be one of the things that's very intriguing is getting more research in and as we go through these podcasts, I'll be able to share some of that information, be able to see what we're seeing in the market. I want to make sure that at the end of the day that we're trying to do or I'm trying to share my knowledge and my learnings with everyone here to be able to actually provide some sort of value. So that's really the first episode here. Just a brain dump. Again, welcome to the beta. I think this is a very much just a brain dump session for me.

to be able to go through and document the process about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Clothing thoughts, man that was a hard word. Clothing thoughts is we're looking at other things as well. One of the big things that I'm hearing from the community side is co -working and that's very, very intriguing. I would love to build a co -working innovation space. So we're going to look at a couple locations later this week. So next week, or I guess this Friday.

or next episode for everyone listening who is not listening as this comes live, which is everyone. We're gonna go look at a co -working space and see if we can strike a deal to be able to help build, again, the community up, be able to build those resources, to be able to push for co -working and innovation within Milton. And that's one of the biggest things that we're hearing right now. So that's a very, very, very, very top of my mind. Again, I'm here to help serve the community, help serve the people who are here.

and be able to help provide them value. Because if we win, everyone wins across the board, which is great. On the Epilogue side, just, you know, you got to continue to get punched in the face. That's really it at the end of the day. Market's hard, clients are hard. Just, I just got to keep my head down and keep grinding away. It's one of those things that, you know, having clients is...

Mike Shoss (23:05.496)
You know, fun overall and I wish I had a few more and we're gonna go through, we're just gonna pursue and get a few more clients in the door. There's a quote that I like about just being punched in the mouth and it's like everyone has a game plan until they get punched in the mouth. And that's why I wholly believe that going and being an entrepreneur is one of the best things that you can be able to do because it teaches you how to actually go and do things, teaches you how to get punched in the face, teaches you how to get told no and move on. Sitting in a classroom is not one of those things that you can be able to do.

And learn you need to actually go through and go through and learn so none of this is easy Everyone has ups and downs and I'm hoping that I can share my ups and downs with you I hope that this inspires at least one person and if that person is you know, my great great great grandkid at some point then great I would absolutely love that But again, I'm just here sharing my thoughts sharing with the the things I've learned across the way And we'll see how this goes, you know 24 minutes into this and I think this has been a great update across the board I'm gonna aim for probably half an hour per episode. I

So I just want to thank everyone for listening. Thanks for listening along with the ramblings. If you like this, please come to the show notes. We do have another podcast as well. So that is also out there. That is Uncharted Business Pass, which where we talk about businesses that are being built in the Milton and Halton region. So that's one of them. Please feel free to also listen in on future episodes. So please feel free to subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts.

Would very much love kind of for you to follow along and be able to get that feedback loop in. So again, I'm Mike Shoss, president of Shoss X. This has been the first episode of HoldCo strategy sessions. I thank you for listening and I hope to hear and see and comment and build with you in the future. Thank you very much.