The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
All right, everybody, welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast where I talk to leaders in, see, this is the thing. I need to know it ahead of time. I talk to business leaders working in and within Laravel, no, working on and with Laravel. It's something like that. I told Chris before the thing that I need to memorize this thing better. But anyway, smart people doing big Laravel stuff. And one of those smart people doing big Laravel stuff is my friend, Chris. So Chris, would you mind saying hi to the people introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what's your kind of...

What's your business and what are you doing and how does it connect with Laravel?

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Chris Morrell. I'm the CEO and CTO of InterNACHI. So InterNACHI is the world's largest home inspection trade organization. We do education for home inspectors. We do certification. And we do a lot around business success, providing tools to help inspectors actually either run their business or market their business or things like that. We're also an accredited college. So we offer a home inspector certificate program for home inspectors among other things.

Matt Stauffer:
I didn't know that.

Chris Morrell:
I have been doing this for a long time so I started working in the home inspection industry when I was 15 as a high school job and the owner of that company pretty soon I think, yeah pretty soon after I started working there you know I was just doing like sort of home inspection report software and working on the website and stuff like that. And I went out and did some inspections, but my business partner, Nick, wanted to get out of climbing into people's attics, which is not fun in the middle of the summer.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I can imagine.

Chris Morrell:
And so he wanted to go out and start this organization. He asked his business partners at the time if anybody wanted to come along with him. And everyone was like, no, we have a good successful business here where we're making money.

Matt Stauffer:
Right, we're not gonna mess with that.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah. But I was a kid. I had nothing better to do. I was like, I'll do it with you. So yeah, we did the whole it wasn't a garage. It was his spare spare bedroom in his house worked worked out of there for a while.

Matt Stauffer:
Close enough.

Chris Morrell:
We worked out of his brother's basement for a while. Did the whole startup thing and you know, I think something that's interesting is we didn't set out to build a technology business, but it was the late 90s, early 2000s, just being...

powered by the web just was such an incredible superpower at the time.I mean, it still is, but it was like just sort of evolving as this thing that you really could rely on. You know, I remember when people weren't comfortable putting credit cards into web forms, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
You know, that we took paper applications for years before we took web applications because people didn't want to give us money. They wanted to send it to paper application and a check in, you know, we had filing cabinets of applications that we hand typed into the you know membership system when we built a membership system that was like connected to a database. So did that for a long time and eventually that was a PHP Application that was all homegrown because that's just that's what it was. It was PHP 3 I remember when PHP 3 came out that was like, okay, this is what we're using.

But years later, it was, you know, we had been looking at options to sort of refactor a bunch of the code. I actually went out and wrote almost an entire feature complete framework. And then I just thought, I don't want to be maintaining this. And I had just heard lots of people talking about Laravel and I just kind of decided after looking at it for a while, this looks like it gives me everything that I need and it's someone else's problem. And that's kind of how I got to the Laravel world.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And it's interesting to me because a lot of people who talk like you do talk like a programmer, talk like that, who have CEO in their title. What it really is, is it's a really small thing. It's one person and they've self-inflated, you know, their self-concept to put CEO on it. So as soon as someone says CEO and starts talking like you do, you kind of like immediately clock out and say, okay, so you're the CEO of a company of one, right? But like you are both extremely technical, very involved in the roots, you know, in the weeds.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah

Matt Stauffer:
And then also you are the CEO of like actual legitimate full size been around for decades company. What does the role split of a CEO and CTO look like? How do you kind of like both run the thing and then also run the code? Or do you still run the code today?

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, I actually do both. Yeah, so for context, we have about 25,000 members and we have about 35 employees. So it's not a gigantic company, but it's a sizable company. I think that the key to being able to do both is to have really, really exceptional leadership in the organization. I couldn't do it if that weren't the case.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
There was a period of time when I wasn't doing both as much, where I was much more on the management side. And I just realized that I wasn't happy anymore, you know? And I just felt like, you know, here we are running this successful organization. I should have the latitude to at least do more of what I want. And here I am not really getting to do the thing that I love. So it took a concerted effort.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
You know, basically in the early days, you know, I think, you know, my originally we called, we called my role the webmaster, right?

Matt Stauffer:
That's how you know you're old. Oh my God. I love that.

Chris Morrell:
And then I think eventually we decided I'm going to call myself the director of IT because that sounded a little bit more official and then CTO, I think eventually. But I kind of... The way I got into the CEO role is interesting because I think I got into business. I started so young. I didn't know. I just didn't know anything. I didn't know any better. And I just like would tell people no, if something was a bad idea.

I'm very grateful to have a, business partner who, who, you know, let me do that, right? You know, he's, he's older than I am and, and, you know, could have been like, yo, like stay in your lane. But, you know, it became sort of this running joke within the organization, like, we have to ask Chris, you know, back when I, before I was technically the CEO. and so there was just a point, you know, internet actually had grown pretty significantly.

Nick had moved out to Boulder, Colorado. So we started out in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. But we'd moved most of the operations out to Colorado. And it just got to this point where I was already sort of driving a lot of those types of decisions, or like was the final say in a lot of those decisions, just because that's how we had started to operate.

And so, you know, there was just this moment when I officially took the role, I moved out to Colorado, kind of like made it a more real thing. Yeah, shifted into that position for a while. But yeah, like I said, I I wanted to be a programmer again, and I have spent the last couple of years making that much more of a reality.

Matt Stauffer:
So I know this is one of the initial questions I always ask and I normally ask people in what ways is Laravel involved in your business and you, covered that pretty quickly, but I do want to step back a little bit and say, like, so you, you talked about a lot of different things that InterNACHI does, but do you think of InterNACHI as ground up a technology company or is it a service company for, you know, these folks who that happens to use technology to accomplish it? Cause obviously technology is very actively involved, but are you a SaaS?

Are you like an organization that happens to use SaaS to provide your functionality, if that makes sense?

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, I think that I often joke that we are a SaaS masquerading as an organization because we really do operate like a traditional SaaS for the most part, a B2B company. We collect membership dues, but you can pay your dues monthly or yearly. And we provide a web application where you access most of your membership benefits.

That's not to say that there aren't lots of other things that are outside of the more traditional SaaS world, because we operate physical training facilities in Colorado and Florida and Pennsylvania, where there's actually a whole house that we've built that's got tons of defects in it that you can walk through.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Chris Morrell:
We hold conferences. This autumn we're going to have our conference in Florida and you know, we'll have maybe a thousand people, a hundred vendors and multiple tracks of educational talks. Like we do all of the traditional membership organization stuff and some non-traditional organization stuff. But I think what we discovered really early on was we can multiply our capacity and reach so significantly by delivering everything via the web. Our competitor at the time, you'd have to go to a testing center and do this awful test and pay $100. And if you failed, you'd have to go and pay $100 again to do the test. And we were able to offer online testing.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And that just expanded our reach so significantly that we ended up leaning into that for everything. So it's a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. But if you're just thinking about how the business operates day to day, it really does operate a lot like a SaaS.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. So if you were to think about the sort of challenges that you run into, you know, first of all, you've got multiple different roles that you have, but one of the things that I think is most interesting about a technical person in the level of senior leadership that you're at is, I see senior leaders often struggle with not necessarily having the, on the hands-on experience to make the decisions that they're having to make around architecture and hosting and some of these bigger kind of like...

As you have a big software company, you have to make big decisions, but the people at the big level don't have that knowledge. So they either have to go down to the people lower in their, their, their organization and say, Hey, you know, someone who's three levels beneath me, tell me what to do. Or they have to ask their friends who may or may not actually know what the right thing is, but at least they have a company, but they might not know the right thing for this particular case. Do you think being a technical person with hands-on knowledge in your tech stack at your level of leadership gives you the ability to kind of like make those big decisions more easily and if so, like what are some things that you've dealt with recently where your kind of like in tune-ness with the Laravel world has kind of benefited you in that way?

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm tapped in enough that I'm pretty confident in those types of decisions that we have to make. I think that one thing that the Laravel community has really rallied around is embracing the seemingly simple monolith concept.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And championing the fact that it is much more powerful than folks want to acknowledge. And so I think that pre-Laravel, we definitely got caught up in some of the fads of looking into microservice architecture, looking into distributed node applications. And I don't regret going down that path necessarily because I think a lot of really useful lessons were learned there.

But I think that those decisions oftentimes are a lot simpler than we make them out to be. I think that a lot of the really, really convoluted architectures that exist right now are much more because they're interesting than because they're useful. Because they are. They're absolutely interesting, right? Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, it's fun to play with right?

Chris Morrell:
But I mean, you we don't have massive scale, right? You know, we're in the low millions of visits a month and, you know, like it's not anything, it's not anything insane, but it's, you know, it's bigger than your toy app. But we're able to get, you know, we're able to get plenty of performance with a couple of EC2 instances and RDS, you know, we lean on the AWS services a decent amount. So, you know, we can offload all the database problems with RDS. We can offload all of our caching with ElastiCache, all of our queuing with SQS. So we do take advantage of some of those like large scale solutions that exist.

But I think for the most part, those decisions I've come to appreciate are not so hard to make. And I think being part of the Laravel world has been really helpful in seeing that. Because I am naturally a very curious technical person, and I love to go down the rabbit hole of like, OK, let's take a look at what Kubernetes does. Right? I'm curious.

And I think that there are spaces, there are applications where that stuff is necessary, but I think the vast majority of times, one or two load balance servers is gonna get you basically where you need to go. And honestly, a dozen, two dozen load balance servers, like, you know, you can architect an application that can scale pretty significantly with just simple load balancing, you know?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. And that kind of takes me to the next question, which is like, if you've solved a lot of the kind of the technical questions that you do have in your play that you feel like you've kind of figured out, is there something coming up for you that you're like, now this is, this is our next challenge. This is what we have not figured out yet, whether it's from scale or from a user experience perspective, like what's, what's tough going forward? What's interesting?

Chris Morrell:
Well, I think that we have some projects going on right now that...

That are very interesting technical challenges in that there's some really, we're in a place where we need to offer a lot of flexibility to a lot of different people. And I think that that generally presents a lot of really interesting technical problems. The more tight scope you have, generally the easier things are. And I think...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
A lot of times, and I've certainly fallen into this trap many a time myself, a lot of times as programmers we get into the, well, how do I build this code to be as universal as possible? And oftentimes that's not the right question to be asking. But we are in an interesting place where because of the way we're scaling out certain parts of our offerings,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
we actually need to start answering some of those questions. How do we take an application that was built primarily for home inspectors and make it available to maybe other industries? Or how do we take a tool that's scoped down to a specific need and expand it out to a generalized purpose? And that's been really interesting and very fun.

But very hard. It's like, how do you start to do these things without, how do you find that balance between over architecture and actually addressing those needs? Especially because I think, generally, I think we've been better at embracing the specific focus. And so now having to expand is an interesting problem to solve.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that there's a lot of, like you said, we have a kind of inherent desire to build something that can do everything, whether it's from a coding perspective, like I came up with this plugin and I want this plugin to work in every setting that is even remotely related to this plugin or whether it's to our business, because the more people who can use our business offering, the more people who want to work for us. Right. So you're like, I could be the National Association of, you know, Home inspectors, but what if I'm the association of anybody who wants to associate in any way, shape or form? Wouldn't we make more money there? But you find that like that narrow scope allows you to market differently, build differently. But as you have to expand, it's like, how do we not just become a massive glob of everything that doesn't do anything, right?

Chris Morrell:
Right, yeah, I mean, we are in this incredibly fortunate position to be the world leader in our industry by a long shot, right? And that puts us in a very interesting, like a very different place than most people. And it's only because, excuse me, it's only because the home inspection industry is relatively small, right? We know there's only, you know, home inspections only exist as a concept in certain countries.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
We know how many homes are sold every year. We know what percentage of homes, you know, forgo the inspection. Like there's, there's a fixed number of inspections that can happen in the U.S. for example. So that really sets the number of inspectors that you can possibly have. And, you know, the, the majority of them are InterNACHI members, which is amazing. But it puts us in this position of, you know, we can't expand into our market in the way we have...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
much longer. So either we have to expand what we offer to our market or we have to expand into other markets. Ya know, those are the options if we want to expand, which is not always the right call. You know, I'm not necessarily saying that we're going to expand in those ways. But we're at this point where we have to be thinking about that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. One of the things that I've found just as a comment is when I see people who are building open source projects or writing code or even building businesses, the vision to understand the narrowness necessary and appropriate narrowness of the scope of what you're doing is really one of the things that it's hard to teach. You know, people either do or do not have a really good sense of how to keep things scoped down and how to say no. Like often the first time you see this new package or project or something come out and everyone's really excited about it and then every person comes in and says, I want this, I want this, I want this and they add everything. They don't have that vision and the understanding of like what's scoping it down is. And of course that's true from an open source perspective, but

Chris Morrell:
Mmm.

Matt Stauffer:
You know, you mentioned that like you were early on known as the guy who says no to things and I'm curious, you know, whether maybe that's a part of why you guys are where you are is because you know how to say no. And I wonder if a big part of business is knowing what to say no to because there's always more options. I mean, my email is full of proposals every day for people who want me to do things with them every day, dozens of them. And I don't use email almost at all for work, but I have part of my job every day is deleting people asking me to do partnerships with them because the answer is no for most of them. And so...

You know, I'm curious for you, do you feel like from a coding perspective as a leader of the code organization, do you have to spend a reasonable amount of time saying no to developers who want the new shiny? Do you have to say no to a part of yourself that wants the new shiny or do feel like you guys are past that?

Chris Morrell:
I mean, it's funny because I think I'm actually, I'm very good at saying no when I have my CEO hat on and I'm, still really struggle saying no when I have the CTO hat on.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep, heard, yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And honestly, I've started to be okay with that. I think, I think that I am in a place and InterNACHI is in a place and some of the some of the some specific decisions that I've made have given me the freedom to say like it's okay to to go down this path just because it's interesting and I'm curious about it. And I think I think for me it's less about the no and it's more about the the explicitness of the decision. I think that I think that a lot of times one of the biggest problems that people, one of the biggest traps that we fall into is making a decision by default instead of actually owning that the decision was made.

Matt Stauffer:
That's great.

Chris Morrell:
And so I think there's nothing wrong with deciding that we're gonna explore something because it's interesting and fun and is going to be rewarding regardless of whether it provides value. Like I think that one thing that I want, you know, that I want as the, you know, the executor at the company is like, I want people to be fulfilled at work. And like that, that can mean like not necessarily doing the thing that's going to be absolute, 100 % most productivity all the time. Right. And I believe that you get,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
net more over time that way, rather than just pushing people to burn out. And so, yeah, I think that sometimes I do have to say no to myself or no to somebody on the technical side, all the time, right? There's always something that could be fun to work on that we have to decide not to work on.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
I think it's a lot easier for me to do it from a business perspective, like understanding sort of the repercussions of every, every yes has so much cost, you know, both opportunity costs and just like focus costs and, and potentially real financial costs. Like there's, there's, there's so many different business costs associated with saying yes to something when it's like a business venture. And I just think like, I want to be really careful of when we do that because there's just only so many of them you get, right? Lots of things are great ideas. You need to really decide which one is the best great idea, you know?

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Well, I mean, you talked a little bit about your team and I want to talk more about your team. And one thing I, one question I ask everybody is like, what's your experience been like in hiring Laravel developers? And you and I actually had a little bit of a conversation because I loved your hiring page, your careers page. So we can talk about that a second, but just kind of off the bat here, what has it been like? And I, again, I, know, I'm curious...

Not only what your experience hiring Laravel developers has been like, but do you think being a Laravel developer yourself has been a superpower in that process? So in general, what's it been like?

Chris Morrell:
Hmm. Yeah, that's an interesting question. Hiring is hard. You know, I think hiring for any position is hard. I think hiring developers is hard as a developer because we come to it with so many of our own opinions that we believe to be facts. And I think it can be really difficult to separate.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
I don't like the way this person approached something from the way this person approached something is is wrong for the way we we do it within our organization, right? So I think obviously you benefit a lot from being a developer because you can you know, you have more knowledge you can you can evaluate but I think it it really is a double-edged sword
because you're a little bit almost too close to the problem. You're too invested. So that's been a challenge.

I think hiring for Laravel developers has generally been good. We don't hire very often. I think that one of the other things that running a Laravel application has allowed for is we run this entire system with three developers, and that includes me. It's me and two other folks. And this is a significant piece of software. We have the original legacy application. I actually don't know the scale of that, because we've basically been chipping things off the legacy application into Laravel. But our Laravel application, alone is 700 plus thousand lines of code. And that's easily managed by three people.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, it says a lot.

Chris Morrell:
And I think having a small team is a value, like it's a value that I hold. So I'm constantly sort of in this place of wanting to keep things focused and have everyone really own the code base, but also acknowledge like we could use another hand because for the first seven or eight years it was just me. And then I hired on one other developer and he was with us for 15 years. And then now we have two new folks and he's left the company.

And at each of those points in time, it was just like, OK, now we really do need more. But the actual hiring process, I've gone two different directions and had very different experiences. So years ago, when I was hiring for our third developer, and it took us a couple of times to land at where we are.

I went down the path of, you know, posted on Indeed and Craigslist back in the day was still a thing and all the major, major places and, you know, go through like a hiring platform. You know, I was listening to Mostly Technical when Ian was talking about his hiring and Ian said something about having a thousand applicants and Aaron's kind of freaking out about it. And I was just like, no, that's just, that's just what happens. You put these jobs out there and you just, so many people will just fire their resume at you with no thought beyond that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yep.

Chris Morrell:
So I would say when we went down that path, we were easily in the 500 to 1,000 applicant range for just a regular PHP developer job. None of the sort of shine of like working for the godfather of Laravel. Like just, just, this is just some random company that's hiring a PHP developer. That is so hard, you know, to, to go through that many people, especially when so many of them are just, you know, they're not trying at all, right? They're, they're literally just uploading their resume and that's it.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And this is pre LLMs. I can imagine it's even worse now because like, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
It is terrible.

Chris Morrell:
And yeah, you know that people are getting lost in the shuffle because you just have to go fast. It's just an awful process. I hated it. And I think part of it is my personality. Part of it is that we're a small company and like, we don't have hiring staff, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. No, you're doing it. It means you're not doing other things.

Chris Morrell:
Going through that process is putting everything else off. And then you know that you're going to have to do all the work of onboarding. That was a bad experience for me, the few times that I've tried that path. What I have done, and I can't recommend this for everybody because it was a lot of work.

But basically there was a moment when I just decided I am going to invest in sort of myself and InterNACHI as like a known entity in the Laravel world because I know we're going to be hiring in the next year or two. And I want to experiment with this idea of like, can I put myself in a position where people know who I am and want to work at InterNACHI? And like, I had this theory.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Chris Morrell:
that that would sort of surface the folks that I wanted to work at InterNACHI. And so, you know, I went through this sort of journey of, you know, being much more involved in open source contribution, being much more present on Twitter, you know, just putting myself out there. And this coincided with wanting to put myself out there for other reasons.

But, I got to this point where I was like, okay, we're ready to hire. I'm going to spend a little bit of time putting together like a really, like a page that would convince me to work at InterNACHI if I looked at it, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And so I focused a lot on, you know, our, like our stack is up to date, right? We do modern continuous integration, continuous delivery. We write tests. We use modern approaches. We aren't in meetings all the time. And we have good benefits. We pay well, all those things too. But I spent some time really trying to think, OK, what is this person, this mythical person that I want to hire? What's going to convince them to jump on this?

And then I did this kind of sneaky thing, which is I posted the link to it saying, hey, anyone have feedback on this page?

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. That's the magic trick, man.

Chris Morrell:
Right? I was just like, let's see what happens. Because I'm not going to put this out on the hiring platforms. Let's just post this on Twitter, post this in a couple little places, and just pretend like I'm just looking for people to give me some thoughts on it. And we got 20 maybe applicants.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, it's much better than a thousand.

Chris Morrell:
10 of them looked really promising. Three of them I would have hired. And we were in, so we had this like incredible, incredible opportunities to just pick our favorite of three really solid candidates. And he's been, he's been great. Like it's been, it was like, it was a joy of an experience.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that.

Chris Morrell:
And you know, it's, you know, it's a data point of one who knows, maybe I just got really lucky this one time. Although I will say, I did, we were, it's kind of funny, we were having a conversation about, we have this problem where DevOps and design are still kind of like bottlenecks that have to go through me.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Chris Morrell:
Everyone on the team can do op stuff and everyone on the team can do some design, but like if we're getting into more sophisticated, like JavaScript interaction stuff, or when we were migrating, we were migrating from Amazon Linux 2 to Ubuntu and also upgrading PHP. That was something that I had to be pretty involved in.

And so we were just saying, god, it would be nice to have a little bit more support in one of those categories. And so I posted again something about the careers page that was just like, we're not hiring, but like if anyone is like 100% like a perfect fit for one of these roles, like that's, was, I was very explicit about that. Like I was like, if you are like really dead on right for one of these roles, like go ahead and reach out. And like, I'm, gonna be meeting with someone tomorrow to see their, their trial run on like he's self-expressed as like, you know, 70 % DevOps.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
30 % I was 70 % design 30 % DevOps experience and he had like he has the experience to to show it like could be an amazing fit so like.. Ask me in a week or two. We may be two for two. I don't know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah I love that. Well, that's awesome. I want to share some thoughts, but I just had to acknowledge for those watching, you may have seen that I reached to the side and I've just got, a pumpkin today's pumpkin spice latte day, AKA the day that, Starbucks allows the fall flavors come back in. And my wife is like, we're going to make one at home. So I want to acknowledge that she just made me an absolutely incredible, homemade pumpkin spice latte, you may see whipped cream on my beard or nose at some point during the so

Chris Morrell:
Oooh.

Matt Stauffer:
Whatever. yeah, man. I don't know if I can tilt it. You can see a little bit of it. Yeah, it's it's hot. It's good stuff

Chris Morrell:
yeah, okay, yeah, this is good. Yeah, that's good stuff. For the listener, there's a nice little helping of whipped cream on top of there and it looks like some pumpkin spice sprinkled over it. Yeah. Amazing.

Matt Stauffer:
Sprinkle cinnamon. that might be what it is. Yeah, something. I don't know. It's great. So sorry. Sorry. But I just didn't want to not acknowledge that that had just happened because I'm living my best life right now. OK, so one of the things that we've experienced at Tighten is that when we put up a job posting, put it through all the and we actually usually only list on Larajobs because if we add to all the other ones like Monster and Indeed, it's even more signal noise ratio is even worse. So Larajobs is the best signal to noise ratio of any of the platforms. But we're still getting

Chris Morrell:
Incredible.

Matt Stauffer:
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of applicants. And so what we do is, it's not a perfect alternation, but usually one on one off. One will do a big hiring round and either one or two after that will just hire within the people we know. And the people we know is both people we talked to in previous rounds, but also like you're saying, the Twitter groups and the whatever. And the benefit of that is that we're able to get people we never would have met if we only hire people we know internally.

Chris Morrell:
100%.

Matt Stauffer:
But to your point, the internal hire world, the people we already have connections to, is so much easier. We're talking five, ten times less effort to do it that way. So I, I'm in support of it. I mean, I've now hired over the years, 40, 50 developers at least. And every time I've hired, like you just described, I wasn't as clever as you and saying, go check out our page. But in general, when I've hired within the world, gotten our name out there, gotten people to know about us. It's so much easier. The quality averages so much higher. You're spending much less time kind of digging through, you know, not, not great fits. So, big brain, Chris good thinking.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, it's not, the unfortunate part is it's not fair. You know, like it does mean that you're not giving everyone an opportunity and you're not finding folks who could be even better fits who are not in those spaces. And I think about that and I don't love that fact.

But I think the reality of a small company, even the size that we are, 35 folks, you just can't operate like a Facebook. Facebook can afford to have an entire machine that handles hiring developers.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Chris Morrell:
And there are incredible pieces to that, but it's just not what we have available to us.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well, I mean, even for you hiring a development team of three and for me hiring a development team of 20 and for Facebook hiring a development team of thousands, there's... I have things at my disposal that you don't. You have things at your disposal that a company of three total doesn't. So each of us have things that we can work with and we shouldn't be pressed to do this in the same way that somebody else does. So.

Chris Morrell:
Right, for sure.

Matt Stauffer:
Love it. So we're getting close to the end and I have so many more questions for you. So I'm going to try and knock out a couple of them. You started your business career at the age of I think 15 and you've been running this business, you know, together with your partner for decades at this point. Obviously a lot of that you've said you just kind of taught yourself as you went, but there are any resources, whether it's a podcast or a book or a video or a mentor that have really helped you get to the level that you're at from a business perspective.

Chris Morrell:
Okay, I've been thinking about this because you I've been listening to the podcast and I said to myself I'm not going to be yet another person who says Radical Candor and stops. It's an incredible book.

Matt Stauffer:
Whatever, if it's good, but it's a good book.

Chris Morrell:
Everyone should read it. It really I mean that that book really, you know, nails so many problems that we have with communication both within a company and just with in general. So I'm going to go ahead and I will recommend Radical Candor to everyone just to follow the bandwagon. But I was thinking about, like, what can I say other than Radical Candor? And I have two thoughts. And I kind of like these because they both come with a caveat of there are two things that I think about all the time that are sort of problematic fundamentally. One is, I can't remember what it was called. It's another stupid four hour name book, but it's one of the Tim Ferriss books where he did interviews with like a thousand people and just like summarized his notes about each interview.

And fundamentally, I think that like the brand of productivity that Tim Ferriss sells is just, you know, flawed. And I, you know, I really don't love that like mentality anymore. But in one of his books, he mentioned this principle that I wish everyone in the world, every business person in the world knew, and I never hear anyone talk about, which is the rule of three and 10.

Do you know this?

Matt Stauffer:
No? Teach me.

Chris Morrell:
No, I haven't met anyone. I haven't met anyone. this is, I think, I looked it up because it's even hard to find any mention of it on the internet. But it's, I think, originally from this guy, Hiroshi Mikitani, who is the CEO of some giant e-commerce platform in Japan, I think. Basically what he said is everything changes at the three and 10 inflection points and this piece of advice has felt so true to me. It's incredible.

So like if you think about a business going from a partnership to hiring your first employee, going to three people, all of sudden, dynamics of the business change.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And you need to make decisions that are like, it's not just two people in a basement just winging it. It's like, now there's somebody who you have to care for and be responsible for. Yeah, it changes entirely. And then

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.

Chris Morrell:
you can kind of operate like a small, nimble business and then you hire your 10th employee and like all of sudden, like eight people, everything's fine. Everything's smooth.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.

Chris Morrell:
The moment you hire your 10th, mean, you just start to need HR.

Matt Stauffer:
It all falls apart, right? No, it's really kind of like that.

Chris Morrell:
You need to have HR policies or like, hiring practices or, you know, just all the things that it was totally fine to just kind of like play it by ear up until then, you know, suddenly it just starts to emerge. And if it's just totally naturally, you just, you need, you need to do things differently. And the same was true for 30 employees. I, ya know, it's you get to this place. I am in a place where I don't know. I couldn't name everybody at the company anymore.

Right? Even a handful of people ago I could have. But we just got to this threshold where there's enough distance between me and the management chain and the hiring processes from some folks that I'm just like, yeah, know if I see their name, I know that they work at InterNACHI. But we've never interacted. I had nothing to do with hiring them.

I have nothing to do with what they do at the company, other than meeting with their manager's director. It felt so true. And then I started to think it also is 100 % true for customers. When we went from the, I can't really remember. I remember hitting the 3,000 member mark and that feeling important, but I can't remember exactly what that was like.

But I so distinctly remember we were stuck at 8, like 8,500 members for a long time. And we finally broke past the 10,000 member mark. And it just felt like all of our customer service processes were just broke down. All of like...

All of the things that had been working for 8,500 people did not work for 11,000 people.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
It was really striking. We needed to change the way we handled communication with membership. We just had to change a lot of our member-facing processes around that pivot point. And we're at 25,000 members right now.
Pre-pandemic, were just on the tipping point of 30,000 and it was feeling like a new inflection point. It was feeling like, you know, it was feeling like we were getting by with a pretty lean team and that was starting to fall apart. And the pressure of that has gone away, you know, as we dropped back down to 25,000 members. So I see it happening again, but...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's great.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, that rule, I just think for any company that's growing, to be able to think ahead and say, okay we're getting to another three or another 10, let's prepare, because it hits you. And if you're not prepared, you just are like, what? Why is everything so hard all of sudden? Everything was good before, why is it so hard now?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. What changed? It's funny because I've told people for ages, there's it's not the real terms of three and 10, but there's someone else who's described that the organizational, the size of an organization of group of people have these kind of like tiers where everything changes. And I think they are, they are so like three and 10 and 30 and 50 and 200 or something. So it's not, but that's the same concept. And I said it for the longest time and kept Tighten to 20 people for the longest time, because that's one of the big, once you get above 20, from according to all everything people said it gets really kind of weird until 50 So maybe you know in the three and ten it would be you know, 30 and 100 or something But either way there's these moments where things get really weird and finally we just had so much work I just couldn't afford to not you know grow. We grew up to 30 and We go up to 30 after being a 10 to 20 person company for a decade and we grew up to 30 and within a year HR issues are weird people's relationships are getting weird. I'm like I've known you for ages and all of sudden the way we're interacting is different and the way you're talking to that person is different. I'm just like this sucks. I don't like this and I. It I knew about this concept and it still crept up on me and I was just like wait a minute. We broached one of the lines and it was very clear that like what I need is to add middle management and management policies or whatever. But then if you're going to do that.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
You have to grow bigger in order to support those people. So I would have had to push the company up to 50, 60 or 100 so that the things I had to do to support the size and I was like, I don't want that. I don't like that.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah. No, it's hard.

Matt Stauffer:
So we're 20 today and I love it. And I'm like, no, I don't want to get any bigger because the next tier up sucks. And even if like we could get through the sucky part of processing it, now all of a sudden I have a 60 person company or 100 person company. I was like, I don't want that. So yeah, love that.

Chris Morrell:
Right, right. I think that's an important question that not enough people ask is like, what do I want? Right? Because yeah, running a running, I mean, at this point, we've gotten through the growing pains and I think InerNACHI runs really well and I don't necessarily regret it, but I miss, you know.

I miss the 10 person days, you know, I miss the 10 to 15. You know, we just had fun in a different way. You just can't have fun. I don't know, you just can't have the same kind of fun when like, it almost feels like at 10 people I could be friends with everyone and at 30 people I have to be their boss, you know?

Matt Stauffer:
That's the difference.

Chris Morrell:
That distinction honestly should be there when you have 10 people too. I think that's problematic in its own way. But I think you can get away with it a little bit more. Whereas at a certain point, you really can't. When we have the convention, I can't go out drinking with staff. I used to be able to go out to the bar with folks after a long day at the convention and hang out with them. I can't do that anymore because it's like, I need to let them decompress and like they, yeah..

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. Without the boss man there.

Chris Morrell:
they can't have the boss around, you know? Yeah, it's hard. It's a hard, it's a hard shift.

Matt Stauffer:
It's weird. Yeah. Yeah. And it's weird because like, you know, Laracon is coming up next week and I want to be hanging out with my team. And I also, there's moments where I can't for business purposes. And I used to think that that was a moment where I'm failing. And now I'm like, no, like y 'all have your own relationships and you can, you can talk crap about me when I'm not there, whatever, like, great. Have a great time with it.

Chris Morrell:
Yep. Yep. Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. Again, I have so many more questions I can ask, but we are, we are at the time where I try to cut. I have one last question of my own and then, But before I do my one last question, I want to ask you, is there anything off of our agenda or not off our agenda that you wish we had gotten to that we didn't get a chance to?

Chris Morrell:
You know, the one other thing that comes to mind is, you know, just kind of coming back to this question of like running and growing a business. I think the the single biggest thing that I learned from a mentor, and that would be my, my business partner, Nick is he is, I would say a master of giving people real responsibility and then letting them live up to it. And I think that that as an employer is one of the most valuable things to do. I think that I really still need to improve at that. But I think I attribute a lot of InterNACHI's success to bringing people on who maybe don't necessarily have all the right skills on paper, but are the right person.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
Giving them real responsibility, letting them fail, and helping them recover from it instead of getting upset about it. I think that those are things that like you know, it's, it's universal to running a business. I think that, that's probably true of development too, like those same principles. But you know, when I was kind of thinking about this podcast that that's the one thing that I, I, you know, I was just reflecting on as sort of one of the core tenants that I think made our, our organization really work. And I'm really grateful for, and I, I, you know, I try to live up to.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm really upset that I can't talk to you more about that because that topic alone I would, I would do a whole episode on, but I really appreciate you sharing that. And it honestly, it's inspiring to me as a business owner who's recently transitioned into a different role. There's a lot of asking people to kind of fill vacuums that came beneath me. And I'm I as a parent and as a business owner, want to just carefully guide everybody through it. And you know, and you're right, you got to

Chris Morrell:
Yep, 100%.

Matt Stauffer:
do the thing and you're my son's in middle school and it's the same thing. I'm like having to learn to like let him do the thing and fall on your butt and you didn't tell me about soccer tryouts until the morning of soccer tryouts and you don't have your cleats because they're at your mom's house and you know, I have work during the soccer tryouts time and I can't make time off, then you're not going to soccer tryouts and that feels crappy, doesn't it? Maybe next time, you know, with love, maybe next time you're gonna tell me earlier, you know? And so like, yeah, that's a great note. I really appreciate that. Okay, because we're short on time.

Last question for you. If somebody came along today and for your share in InterNACHI offered you $100 million, what do you do tomorrow?

Chris Morrell:
I probably, okay, so I think I would try really hard to not do anything for a while.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Chris Morrell:
I think that's very difficult for people to do. I think it's very difficult for me to do. I think that I am at a point in my life, you know, I turned 40 last year, I'm turning 41 in two days...

Matt Stauffer:
Happy almost birthday.

Chris Morrell:
thank you, where... I should be maybe paying a little bit more attention to my physical health and I never have the time for it. Right.

Matt Stauffer:
I feel you. I'm there man. Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And I think I have this working theory that if I let myself be bored for a couple of weeks I might find some capacity to do some of the things that I've been saying I should do.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
And this is this is an interesting question because I actually I just did an episode of over engineered where I talked about this idea of taking a sabbatical. So I've been thinking about this premise a lot. So I think I would try, I think I would try to really honestly not like not do anything for a little while. But after that, I mean, I think that I would end up doing a lot of the things that I do now. I would work on open source. I love, I love being part of the Laravel community and contributing to open source. And I love the way that lets me be the kind of developer that I like to be best, which is I think solving the framework level type problems.

I think that a lot of times when you're building your own application, you need to constantly be holding back from building these super generalized solutions. But the super generalized solutions are really interesting and compelling. And when you're doing you know, more package framework type work, get to, you get to like lean into those a little bit more.

So I would probably, I would probably do a lot of programming on open source. I would spend a lot of time with my kids. You know, I think a lot about this idea of the 18 summers that you have with your kids, you know, like you really only get 18 and that's it.

Matt Stauffer:
Punched me in the heart. Oh my God. That's good. Yeah.

Chris Morrell:
I'm so sorry. But it's kind of true. And my oldest is 12. She already just wants to go up into her room and read books. Prioritize just really being around. I think that would be another big piece of it. Yeah, and see where it went from there.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. I love that. it's funny cause you, you had said several things and I was going to make quick responses and then you said that thing about the 18 summers and I, everything left my mind. My goodness.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, it really puts it in perspective, doesn't it?

Matt Stauffer:
It really does. W ow. I remember what it was, but still, wow. I've been recently reading a book called the Financial Management of a Marketing Firm, I think is by David C. Baker. It's a $400 book. Nobody should just go grab it, but it's good if you're running a marketing firm. But literally chapter one, one of the first things that covers is the idea that in your partnership agreement, you should have certain things set out, expected that everybody should get at certain points. And it says it strongly recommends a three months sabbatical every 10 years, which at the very beginning it seems like, three months every 10 years for someone who's, you know, we put our mortgages on the line for this company. That seems like not a big deal until you get decades in and you haven't taken any days of sabbatical. And you're like,

Chris Morrell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Huh, wish I'd put that in. So I have not heard you're over-engineered about sabbatical, but I just wanna encourage you, consider giving yourself three months every 10 years and you might have a little bit of sabbatical stacked up there.

Chris Morrell:
I'm thinking about more than that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, well, but I mean, you're more than 10 years in as well. So that's why I'm like, you're it might be easy to line it up there. So.

Chris Morrell:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Right, right. I've accrued more than three months. Yeah, you're right.

Matt Stauffer:
Exactly. Yeah. Well, dude, this was such a fun time. I really appreciate you coming and hanging out with us. And for those who obviously are interested in more information from you, they can, you know, follow you on Twitter, everything, but you've also got a podcast. Can you give plugs for all different ways people can follow you before we wrap?

Chris Morrell:
Absolutely. Okay, so you can follow me on Twitter. You can also follow me on mastodon RTSN.dev. Honestly in the past three or four days I Have almost shifted entirely over and I think that it might be the end. I've you know, I'll still be on Twitter some but I.. Yeah, this is a whole other topic of conversation. But yeah Find me on artisan.dev find me at cmorrell.com. You can get all my social stuff there.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Chris Morrell:
I have a podcast Over Engineered. We are up to 23 episodes. I believe so it's been a little over a year. It's been it's been a blast and You know, I think the things that I would plug are the open source packages that I've been most excited about so so I'm working on an event sourcing package called verbs with Daniel Colburn

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Chris Morrell:
If you're coming to Laracon, you'll get to see that in action. I'm very excited about that and check it out. We manage a project called Modular if you are trying to manage a you know half a million to a million line of code code base Splitting it out into logical modules is going to be your friend and even much smaller code bases depending on the scope of your project. I would recommend people check it out.

And the last one I'm going to plug is the one that I think gets the least love. It's called Gretel. It's a breadcrumb package. And I can't imagine handling breadcrumbs any other way once you've used Gretel, because it lets you attach the breadcrumbs to your route definitions. So if you delete the route, you delete the breadcrumb. When you add a route, you add the breadcrumb. You don't have to manage these things in two separate places. So check those and all the other open source projects that I'm working on.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it. And if anybody listening is a coder, I would say that the things that you have solved here, event sourcing and breadcrumbs and modularization, those are not the only packages out there that do them. But I have looked into Chris's packages and each of them, and I know that Verbs isn't just yours, are my favorite implementation of that concept.

Chris Morrell:
I appreciate it.

Matt Stauffer:
So you have a skill in building an API for a package that I think is really notable. So if I were to do modularization, I would pick the one that you made. If I were to need breadcrumbs, I'd pick the one you made. And I have dug into the event sourcing world and ran away screaming years ago. Daniel did some work with Tighten and used Verbs for it. And while I'm still not an event sourcing guy in most contexts, it is the most manageable, enjoyable event sourcing experience I've ever had. We obviously don't have time for that in the podcast, but I just want to name, if you are...

If you're trying to decide between one of Chris's and another one, I would definitely recommend Chris's.

Chris Morrell:
I appreciate that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and I appreciate you. Once again, thank you so much for hanging out. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. And yeah, I really appreciate you.

Chris Morrell:
Thanks so much for having me.

Matt Stauffer:
All right, and for the rest of you all, I'll see you next time.