in my career I was always biasing towards equity. So when I was a value in opportunities I always wanted the long-term upside and you know my vision of that was I was playing the long game. You know, it's like I don't want to just earn a salary, you know, I want to, I want financial freedom, I want that upside. I want to see the upside of the things I'm investing in my energy into you. Welcome to the Second in Command Podcast, produced by the COO Alliance and brought to you by its founder, Cameron Herald.

In the second in command podcast, we talked to top COOs who share the insights,

strategies and tactics that made them the chief behind the chief.

And now here's your host, Cameron Herald.

All right, we've got a great guest today on the Second Command

podcast, a Canadian from Edmonton, Canada named Ben Zitlau. Ben is the

CTO and chief operating officer of Parakeeto. They're a software company that are, they build software for

marketing agencies and digital agencies, creative agencies, great platform, great product.

He's going to talk a lot about his methodologies and systems thinking, his approach

to actually building companies, the way that he talks about problem-centric thinking, the way that

he gets his team to analyze problems and situations before he says no to their ideas or says yes to the ideas in the same approach at working with customers.

I think you'll like some of his methodologies and thought processes behind not only building the company, but also working with the clients that they have.

We'll see you on the inside. You can also watch this episode on our Second Command Podcast YouTube channel. So Ben, welcome to the Second and Command podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, looking forward to chatting with you today and to learning from you today.

Also, love the fact that you are based in Edmonton, Canada where my wife and I met 14 years ago,

so it's kind of a good spot for me. We were actually in Edmonton this summer. I don't

if you remember when the big fires hit Colonna and the whole lake lit up with flames. We were there

for about 36 hours. We were supposed to be there for the whole week hanging out with friends from

Colonna that are all entrepreneurs and after 36 hours of really brutal air

we just said let's get out of here and we drove to Edmonton. So we drove from

Colonna to Edmonton, hung out in Edmonton for five days, reconnected with some friends there that we have,

...