How Business Leaders Should Approach AI, with Joanna Pineda

How this transcript was made

Transcribed by machine from the published audio, then corrected by hand. It is not a verbatim record: the changes below were made, and are counted.

This episode

42 speaker turns, 55 changes.

• closing CTA identified as CTA 2 - Subscribe (v4) (match 98%), replaced with the authored script and attributed to Max

What was changed in these transcripts, and what was not

Generated: 2026-09-25 from 2026-09-25-named/, itself transcribed from the audio that is live on the feed. Every change below is mechanical and counted. No sentence was reworded, no claim altered, nothing removed for being awkward.

The editorial decision

Owner's choice, 2026-09-20: light clean. "Um", "uh" and stammered word repeats ("and, and") are removed, because nobody intends to say them. "You know", "I mean", "kind of" and "sort of" are KEPT - they run to roughly 2,300 instances across the catalogue and stripping them would make the page read as somebody else.

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What was deliberately left alone

• "Program". A computer program keeps that spelling in UK English; only a broadcast or a scheme is a "programme", and only a reader can tell which was meant.
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• Capitalised words mid-sentence that would otherwise have been respelled: 4 of them, most often part of a name. Left as spoken.
• Retired show and brand names. Spoken by the host and guests. A transcript that removes what was said is not a transcript.
• "Co-pilot". Sometimes Microsoft's product, sometimes the metaphor. A rule would corrupt the honest ones.

The synthetic segments

The opening voiceover on the archive episodes and the closing call to action are read by Max, the show's AI narrator, from a script written in advance. Transcribing them means guessing at words already on file, and the guesses were wrong in places - one opener came back as "an AI that boned him up" where the script says "phoned him up". Those passages carry the authored text instead, and are attributed to Max rather than to the guest: the diariser groups Max with the non-host speaker, which would otherwise put a real person's name on words they never said.

Alastair McDermottHow do business leaders navigate this whole world of AI? It's super complex, it's evolving, it's moving at this incredible rate. And then we have the human equation.

We've got our teams, our people to think about as well and how they're reacting and how they're thinking about this. I have a super guest to talk with you about this today.

Her name is Joanna Pinata and we're gonna talk about how she's thinking about AI and how she is talking to her team of 50 developers and people in her development agency.

And how they're thinking about using, reacting and talking about AI.

And I think this is really insightful in how we should be thinking about talking to our teams about this and how we should be thinking about testing and learning about how to use these and

kind of raising the bar for everybody on AI literacy. And today my guest is Joanna Pinata. Joanna, you're very welcome to the show.

Joanna PinedaThanks so much for having me.

Alastair McDermottIt's a pleasure. I wanted to talk to you. I know that you were on a panel talking about AI recently and we chat a little bit beforehand.

So you are a CEO and Chief Troublemaker at Matrix Group. Yes, I am. And so the Matrix Group is a web and marketing agency, is that right?

Joanna PinedaYes. So we're a digital agency. We work primarily with associations and non-profits. And we use our tool set of web, mobile apps, custom software, custom integrations.

Plus we've got an association management system and a virtual conference platform for associations.

But really what we help them do is increase membership, increase revenue, increase engagement. So it's really about helping them succeed digitally.

Alastair McDermottAnd you're also a podcaster. You have a podcast called Associations Thrive with about 90 episodes. Is that right?

Joanna PinedaYes. I actually have two podcasts, a personal one and a professional one. The professional one is called Associations Thrive.

And I interview association and non-profit CEOs about their personal journeys and about the things that they're doing differently to thrive as organisations. It's been an amazing journey.

The stuff they share, absolutely amazing.

Alastair McDermottActually, I need to check that one out now. I'm making notes for myself already. Okay, let's talk about AI.

And so the question we were talking about is how do business leaders, thought leaders navigate AI? And this is something that I think we've both been thinking a lot about the last year.

And I know that you were talking about some stats like 60% of people are using AI in certain businesses. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about that.

And you talk about, you know, making an intentional decision to reinvent your business every three to four years. So I'd love to dig into that as well. Okay.

So where would you like to start? Well, we start just specifically about the use of AI. Is that okay?

Joanna PinedaYeah, sure. Absolutely. So the stat comes from the IdeaCast podcast for Harvard Business Review. I was actually just listening to it. I love that podcast, by the way.

If you're not listening to that one, Alastair, it's called IdeaCast, and it's amazing. And for the last couple of years, they've been really doubling down on AI.

Maybe every three, four episodes is about AI. And the stat they gave us is 60% of employees or workers are actually using AI in some way, shape, or form.

It's not always sanctioned or out in the open, but they're using it in some way, shape, or form.

Maybe they're just using ChatGPT to come up with some prompts or to help them with their writing, or maybe they're helping them with their coding or something. But it's out there.

And so the question for any leader, I think, is what's your AI strategy? And there's so many facets to this. I do think about this like almost every day, Alastair.

Alastair McDermottSo can you tell me then, like, what is your AI strategy or how do you think about this problem?

Joanna PinedaYou know, that's a good question. I don't know that I fully articulated the strategy. But I think going back to what you asked me about, the company reinvention.

So kind of what we say at Matrix is that we have to reinvent ourselves every three to four years because the tech changes and because the circumstances change.

And like some things don't change, right? Like we're still working with associations and nonprofits and how we serve them and the values that we have and the intimacy that we have with them.

But what we do changes and sometimes how we do it changes.

And so during the pandemic, we really had to change our services, really, because many of our clients were in a period of like acute distress and reinvention because their conferences

couldn't happen. So there was a whole lot of innovation that happened there.

And now that we're post-pandemic, associations are, I mean, some of them are pivoting back to their kind of their normal, but some of them aren't.

And so what I said to my staff is, hey, post-pandemic, we have to reinvent ourselves because if we don't, we die, right?

We actually have seen companies in our space that didn't reinvent themselves. And just, you know, recently we've seen them just die.

So I said, guys, we have to reinvent ourselves and AI is going to be a big part of it. So that's been the company mantra. And we're trying to explore AI in all its facets.

So we're trying to think about how do we use AI for productivity gains? Maybe we code faster. Maybe we write faster. Maybe we take notes better.

But we're also thinking about AI as a service delivery thing. Like how do we serve our clients better? We're thinking about it in terms of products.

Are there some new products and services that we as a company can be offering that are AI powered? And then also we're thinking about it in terms of strategy, right?

So like where does AI fit into our suite of services? And what's our position with regard to the use of AI in everything? I don't know that it's been well articulated yet.

I'll be candid with you. We're kind of bumbling along, but we are working on it and we're trying to be intentional about it. And it's definitely not in the closet of Matrix.

It's definitely out there. Like there's a weekly meeting to just kind of share. There's a Slack channel and there are active conversations and active what we call tests, if you will.

So like, for example, there's maybe about a dozen of us that have been testing out different AI note-taking tools. And so we get together to say, what are you finding? What's good?

What's not good? What prompts are working? Are there ways to make the note-taking better?

So for example, yesterday we actually had a meeting and we said, hey, if you talk during the meeting a certain way, the notes are better.

So even like, even our behaviour changes in order to get a better result from the AI note-taker. So that, those are some of the things that we're doing.

Alastair McDermottI love it. And, you know, you say you're bumbling along. I think everybody is bumbling along to some degree. But I think that what you're doing there is very well structured actually.

So you're talking about the different ways that you can use it.

So everybody talks about, you know, the one I see all the time is using AI to do social media marketing, you know, to write that,

write marketing messages, which I think is one of the most horrible ways you can actually use it. But the productivity gains, that one's a big one for me.

Note-taking, service delivery is really interesting, how you might be able to integrate that. What you're talking about there is like, just like the title of this show is AI powered.

How can we actually use AI in our businesses in this, you know, authentic way, in this intentional way.

And I love the level of communication that you're talking about there, you know, weekly meetings, you have a Slack channel,

and you actually have people testing tools and you're testing them yourself. I think that this is not bumbling along.

I think that this is like the gold standard of how businesses should be thinking about AI.

Joanna PinedaWell, I think leaders almost have an obligation to be experimenting because I seriously think that if an organisation says,

you know, this is a fad, or if they say, let's wait, I think they're going to get overtaken. And I think that they're not going to find the productivity gains.

I also think that staff these days are saying, actually, they've been saying this for the long time, how can you help me be better at my job? How can you make sure that I continue to learn?

How can you make sure that I have the best tools so that I can be amazing at my job? I think AI is part of that. I think that if I didn't include AI, oh, actually, I'll give you a story.

So this was back in 22, we were working on a project, and we had been testing Copilot, right, the code generator from GitLab,

maybe it's GitHub, I don't know, one of them, it's now Microsoft.

And we said, hey, let's do a pilot, and this is early 22, where two of the developers who are working on this project are going to get Copilot.

And I said, let's do it, tell me kind of what you learn, and, you know, let's do it for 90 days. And at the end of the 90 days, the two developers said, please do not take this away from us.

And I said, well, you know, is it totally changing what you're doing?

And they said, in small ways, not really, like, writing code, but, like, kind of automating some of the really kind of drudgery tasks as part of the coding.

And they were both really experienced developers, so it's not like they weren't looking at this code. But what's interesting is they said, I will be really sad if you take this away from me.

And I think there was this subtext of, I might quit if I don't have the tools I need to be able to do my job. I think increasingly that's going to happen.

Now, there are some people who might say, I'm going to quit if you make me use AI tools.

And that's the other side of being a leader is navigating the different ways that people approach AI and are threatened by it, are excited by it, you know, are energized by it.

I think all of that needs to be part of how we handle that in our culture.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I think it goes back to the kind of the traditional change management and, you know, bringing people in and making it collaborative and communication. You talked about a town hall.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you're thinking about that?

Joanna PinedaYeah, so we have town halls on a regular basis at Matrix because I feel like I need to give my staff the chance to just kind of say what's on their mind.

And we've had town halls, a couple of them about AI. Well, okay, let me step back. So we have these weekly meetings where we're actually working, where we're like, hey, let's try this.

Have you tried this? Like, you know, what have you found about this? But we've had a couple town halls where we just said, what do we think about this? So we did a trial of Duet from Google.

A bunch of us had it. We had a town hall and I said, hey, what do we think about Duet? Is it worth the 30 bucks, you know, per user per month?

And the prevailing kind of feeling at that point was no. So I said, okay, like we're going to wait to see if Duet gets better. And that was the town hall.

People were just kind of talking openly about it. I'm about to do a town hall where people can specifically express their concerns, their doubts, and their challenges to AI.

Because I have a few of those in my company. And to be honest, I've kind of tried to not brush them aside, but I've tried to tamp them down a little bit.

And I'm realising that if I do that for too long, they're going to feel like they weren't being heard. And because they're longtime employees, I obviously want them to feel heard.

But I also don't want them to put doubt in other people's minds. So I really, I'm going to have a town hall to just say, okay, this town hall is about your concerns. Let's talk about them.

What's legit? What's not? Which concerns should I take on as the leader? And which concerns should you take on as the employee?

Because I think that the faster I can get people with me, the faster the reinvention at the company.

Alastair McDermottYou know, it's interesting. And it's very easy to go either to the extreme of being overly optimistic and positive about what AI is going to do for us.

Or to go to the total doomer, you know, this is going to ruin society, work, and everything. It's so easy to kind of swing back and forth to either of those.

But I think that there are genuine concerns. And, you know, I think it's important to address those.

And for people, you know, like the way I think about this, anybody who is in, anybody who's a knowledge worker, who sells their expertise,

who is maybe in customer service, AI is coming for us first. And, you know, like this is the, this is where like I've already seen friends losing jobs because of AI.

And I know that I potentially lost a sale because of AI, which is really interesting. Oh, interesting.

So, you know, I have seen it kind of nipping at, you know, nipping at the heels in some ways. And it's like, okay, the writing is on the wall.

And what we're seeing here in terms of AI, I think the thing that people don't, don't quite get yet is just the rapid acceleration and the rapid impact.

Because this is like the dawn of the internet, only 10 or 20 times faster. Things are going to change very rapidly.

So, it's going to be an interesting time in every sense of the word, I think.

So, yeah, I like what you're talking about there, you know, about creating a forum for people to, you know, to be heard and to express what may very well be real,

legitimate concerns or may not be. And maybe it gives you a chance to address the concerns that may not be as legitimate but are still, you know, are still fears that people have. So, yeah.

Well, can I say something about that?

Joanna PinedaYeah, go ahead, please. I think that there's a concern on the part of some people, maybe a lot of people, about potentially losing their jobs.

I want to surface that at my company because no one is losing their job at Matrix because of AI.

Now, I'm going to be honest and say we may not make the next hire that you think that normally we would have. But because of AI, maybe we wouldn't hire that person.

But my intention is not to lose anybody and I'm going to make that really clear.

And I think that as leaders, we got to be clear about our intentions because otherwise the rumour mill goes, right?

And otherwise there's like fear and doubt, uncertainty, and that's going to kill a company really fast. So, I'm going to make that very clear.

But the other thing is I think that if companies are growing, then people don't lose their jobs because you're fueling growth.

And hopefully what you're doing is fueling growth with some productivity gains that you gain from AI, which actually makes you more profitable so people actually benefit. That's my plan.

Like I don't know if it's going to work, but that's my plan. I want to squeeze out some more productivity so that we're actually doing more with the same number of people.

But I don't have people like working nights and weekends. And I'm going to say that over and over and over again.

Alastair McDermottYeah, I think you're approaching this in a good way.

One of the things that I've seen is like your colleagues were talking about, AI taking away some of the grunt work has actually made it easier to do work and has made it more pleasurable to

do tasks that would have been very – it's not even that it speeds up the time. It just takes away doing the annoying stuff that you didn't want to have to do.

And I found it really good for those types of repetitive tasks, you know, processing large amounts of text and things like that. I haven't used it a whole lot for coding.

I've used it a little bit for coding. And that has been really interesting, some good and some bad, but I got it to do some work on my podcast.

And it's brilliant for tasks relating to podcast transcript s and show notes and titles and things like that. It's really good at those.

But I have found it's taking away of just the stuff that is kind of irritating type of tasks, and it just makes it much easier to get work done.

So I can really see it not just increasing productivity, but actually making people's life easier, which goes to what your colleagues were saying.

Please don't take this away from us, you know. Right. So is there, how else are you thinking about AI?

Is there anything else that you think about in terms of AI, particularly in the context of thought leadership?

Because I know that people don't like to call themselves and kind of self-proclaim themselves as thought leaders, but I think that you probably are a thought leader.

And I'm just wondering how you think about AI in terms of that type of work.

Joanna PinedaYou mean, is the question, are we really experts and thought leaders if maybe we didn't produce the content?

Alastair McDermottYou know, that's a question that I've been thinking about and talking with people on this podcast.

Because, I mean, the counter argument is, well, we have had ghostwriters for, you know, for probably for millennia.

You know, this isn't a new idea to have somebody else do the actual writing for you.

But I think at the scale and speed, and because it's a machine, I think that that impacts on potentially on your credibility. And that's the question. I mean, how do you think about that?

Is that something you've thought about?

Joanna PinedaYou know, I haven't really thought about that much, and I'll tell you why. I don't know that thought leadership comes necessarily from your writing.

I think it comes from the experiences that you've gained. And writing about it and speaking about it kind of expresses your thought leadership.

But, I mean, I'm of a certain age, and my expertise really is hard fought and hard won, right? Like, a school of hard knocks from the projects that didn't go well, the projects that failed.

And so, I think that's maybe where my expertise comes from.

But you ask an interesting question, and that is, if I'm doing all this writing and I do fancy myself a writer, is it still me if an AI is writing it?

And then, therefore, is it still credible and authentic? I'll tell you, because I do fancy myself a writer, I often fight with the ChatGPT when I write things.

I mean, I, you know, my company just celebrated this 25th anniversary, and I wanted to do a 25th anniversary blog post. So, I gave it a ton of props, and I tried five different ways.

Everything it spit out was just kind of, you know, generic dribble, right?

And it's funny, because my director of marketing said, my God, if we see Embark one more time, right, then, you know, we're just going to vomit.

So, I basically said, okay, here's some interesting ideas, but I'm just going to have to write it in the Joanna way.

And maybe in the future, I can train ChatGPT or something else to write in the Joanna style. You know, that's an interesting question. I mean, let's take it to a developer, right?

So, like, if you have, like, I was actually in a meeting with the solutions architect from AWS assigned to our account.

And he said, you know, half my coding these days is written by Code Whisperer. So, is it his code? Is it his brilliance coming through if half of it is coming from Code Whisperer?

I don't know.

Alastair McDermottIt's a fascinating question. So, I spoke with Erin Austin, who is an IP lawyer, on a previous episode of the show.

And one of the things she differentiated between using AI to generate code or text, using it to generate something that we use ourselves,

versus using it to generate something that we want to sell. And I think that's a really important distinction, in particular, when it comes to things like copyright.

And so, the way I would approach that would depend on what I was doing with the output, if I was selling the output versus if I was using it in some way.

So, I thought that episode is probably worth a listen because of that and speaking with an actual lawyer.

Because I know a lot of people are kind of, you know, still trying to figure out the whole legal aspect.

And I think until we get a lot more court cases and a lot more rulings that we won't really know where the boundaries are with that.

Joanna PinedaWell, I'll tell you where we are today, at least at my company.

And that is, if we are using AI tools to assist in the work that we're doing for clients, it has to go through the same review that code, all code and all writing written by a staffer.

And I would imagine, I mean, I ask people on a regular basis, how much of your stuff is being written by, you know, by AI? And at this point, it's probably only 5-10%.

It's really very little. And I think for the developers, they're basically using it to automate some tasks.

I had a conversation with another developer who said, you know, over the course of, you know, how many years I've automated some functions.

And, like, mine are better than what, you know, a co-pilot can do. But everything still has to go through the same review process, right?

So, like, if we're writing a blog post and I write it still has to go through my director of marketing's review. We still fact check and we still grammar check.

So, I think if you put those in place, it's still you, I guess, right?

Like, so if my essay, my solutions architect, says that half of his code is being written by Code Whisperer, I guess he's still guiding the code and he's still checking the code.

Alastair McDermottYeah. And that speaks to having good processes and systems there. Right. Absolutely. The other thing, talking about the quality of output and particularly the quality of writing.

And we saw with ChatGPT3, when that appeared on scene, that was the first time where it was pretty good. And there was a lot of tools built on that that people are still using today.

And then 3.5 came out, which was a big increase. And that's the free version that a lot of people are using now. But it's still, it's still very identifiable in the phrases that it uses.

And it sounds kind of bland and mediocre. And it talks about delving and in a world where... Delving and embark. Yeah. Delving and embarking. Yeah. So it's really identifiable.

But ChatGPT4 was, again, a lot better. Still has those same problems. But, like, for example, I've created a custom GPT where I've uploaded several of my books and blog posts.

And I've given it specific instructions. And actually, it's able to write pretty close to how I would write. Wow. It's much better once it's been trained.

Now, I've given it about, you know, 150,000 words of my writing to train on. But the output is much better now.

And then when ChatGPT5 comes out, which could be any day now, that is going to be, I think, another big leap forward.

And judging from what the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Alton, has said, I think that they're kind of trying to prepare people for the fact that it's going to be another big step forward.

And maybe they've been delaying the, you know, they've had it ready for a while, it seems.

So they're delaying in order to let people get ready for the fact that it's going to be another leap. So these tools are getting better and better.

So if you have tested these tools, particularly a while back, and you're finding that they're not so good, I would caution anybody listening to this not to write it off because they're

improving at such a fast pace. It's incredible.

Joanna PinedaYou know, I totally agree with you. I mean, 4.4 is so much better than 3.5. And we find that. Here's what we find at the company.

When we ask ChatGPT for assistance, the more, well, if it's a topic that it knows a lot about, then it's going to do much better.

But I'll tell you, the funny thing about my podcast is, so I interview these association nonprofits, and some of these associations are quite obscure, right?

There was one CEO that I interviewed, and she is the CEO of a certifying body that certifies certifying bodies of independent schools.

Like, it was, you know, very meta and very niche, like, you know, two, three people in the organisation certifying, specific certifying bodies.

And I uploaded the transcript and said, hey, can you write some show notes and, you know, do it in this style? And it just completely fell apart. Like, just couldn't do it.

But when I asked ChatGPT to give me show notes or social posts for an organisation, an interview with the CEO of an organisation that helps high school students that are first generation or

families never went to college, the content was beautiful.

So clearly, because it had been trained on this content, it could take all the previous learning, take the stuff that came out of my podcast, and do a beautiful job, obviously, with edits.

So I think there's a bit of, you know, has it been trained on this information, and then has it gotten better? We've actually found that the note-taking tools have gotten much better.

Like, there was one that we were reviewing yesterday, and we were just gasping at how good it was.

Alastair McDermottAnd that was another interesting comment you made about how it's actually changing your behaviour on calls.

Is that like talking about, okay, I'm assigning this to myself or, you know, making specific statements like that, like declarative statements?

Is that what people are doing now on your calls, too?

Joanna PinedaOh, yeah. So here's what's happening, right? So we have a bunch of us that are testing out different note-taking tools, like Fathom and Zoom AI and Fireflies and just all the stuff.

And what we're finding is that the note-taking tools do a better job if you're actually declarative. So we'll say things like, okay, so that's a next action. And then we're clear about it.

At the end of the meeting, we'll say, well, let's review the next steps. Now, in notes, that's awesome, right? Because you have that.

But what we find is we're actually almost trying to train ourselves to help the note-taking AI do a better job. And it's subtle, you know, but just different ways.

But anyway, it's little things like that that we're learning, but we're also sharing. Because notes at my company, they're like the grease, right, that helps everything keep moving.

Because the faster you can get notes out to a client, the faster you can get notes out to staff, the faster you can get those notes into a JIRA item, the better your staff.

They now have a whole week to do the work before next week's meeting instead of three days because you got to the notes, you know, a couple days later.

So, and the quality of notes also matters at my company because I always say that she who writes notes writes history, right? Because you didn't take notes. This is what I say happened.

Yeah. And so, good notes just grease everything and helps keep everything moving.

Alastair McDermottDo you think about the privacy implications and that side of things when it comes to using these note-taking tools?

Joanna PinedaAll the time. So, one of the things that has come up at Matrix is what about the privacy of our client information?

So, this is the reason why I wanted the testing of these AI tools to be out in the open because very early we said nobody uses tools until it's been reviewed by one of the developers and the

chief privacy officer has actually reviewed the terms of service. Because otherwise, we might be doing something bad. And we have some very hard and fast things.

Like we've got a couple of clients, for example, that deal with PHI, personal health information.

Even if during a meeting we're not talking about anything related to PHI, we've just said categorically, just in case something happens or because of the optics,

there will be no AI note-taking tools at those meetings. So, there are certain guidelines that have come about because we've had these conversations. Here's the other thing.

This is actually something I learned from Boy Scouts. When someone complains about something, you put them in charge. So, when one of my staff said, you know, there's privacy issues.

Yeah, that's what you do. So, when somebody, a couple of them said, you know, we've got all these privacy issues. I said, you are absolutely right.

Can I put you in charge of looking at the terms of use and coming up with guidelines for the company? And they happily said, yes, absolutely. Awesome.

Now, I'm using their powers for good use and their concerns for good use, right?

Alastair McDermottYeah. Yeah. I love it. And this, I think that this is kind of setting a roadmap for anybody listening, if they haven't put these things in place,

for how they might actually implement AI, you know, putting team members on, you know, on things like privacy and ethics to vet the tools,

testing the tools, having the strong communication that you're talking about. You've got a Slack channel for this, you're having regular town halls.

I want to dig into something you mentioned right at the start or in the pre-show, where you said you reinvent your business every three or four years deliberately.

And I know you talked a little bit about the pandemic, but it sounds to me like that's something that you've been doing for a long time.

Can you tell me a little bit about your thought process behind that?

Joanna PinedaYou know, it wasn't intentional at first, but on a regular basis, we step back and say, you know, what's the market doing?

And then we say, what's our offensive strategy and what's our defensive strategy?

So very early in the history of the company, like very early when we started, we were doing kind of custom meeting registration forms.

We were just doing e-commerce and kind of, we were doing websites and then with these bolt-ons, right? And then something started to happen.

The association management systems and the CRMs that the associations were using started to build in those functions into their services.

So I mean, I had a couple of clients that said, Joanna, you know, we don't need this anymore because our CRM or AMS, our association management system now has this.

So we actually had a reckoning in the company and we said, oh my God, defensively and offensively, like this work that we're doing is going to go away. So what do we need to do?

And that's actually what led us to build our own association management system.

Because we said, you know what, maybe we're going to get into that business and build amazing www, what we call www versions of these meeting reg forms, online stores, et cetera.

So that was maybe the first reinvention because there was a very real thing that was going to happen.

The one thing that I think companies don't pay enough attention to is slow decline, right? It's the slow decline that kills you. It's like two or 3%.

Like one client cancels a project and then another client cancels a project.

And if you don't counter that with a defensive and an offensive strategy, it takes a few years, but then you're out of business.

So that's one example during the pandemic, you know, we had clients, these are associations, boom. The dominoes kept falling. We had a client in Hawaii and they were in place.

Pandemic got announced, meetings cancelled. We had another client, 15,000 people arriving in Boston the next week, cancelled.

We had another client, 80% of the revenues coming from their annual conference, cancelled.

And we said, okay, this could be it for Matrix because they won't have any money to do anything with us. And we said, we have to do something both defensively and offensively.

And that's when we got to work right away on a virtual conference platform. Now, the space is crowded, right?

There's a lot of companies, but we said, can we combine tech with services the way we've always done it? And we don't need to be the big player.

We just need to be big enough and generate enough revenue to obviously help our clients, but also to keep growing.

So now that the virtual conference business has done this, we still have clients using our platform, but it's gone down a lot. We've said, okay, what's the next thing?

So there's actually a group of people at the company also who meet monthly and do scanning. And we're always just like, what's new? What do we see?

Bunch of the stuff never, you know, affects anything that we do, but sometimes there'll be a nugget and we'll say, you know what? That's something we've got to explore.

So a couple of years ago, we were exploring heavily ver ifiable credentials, which is a standard for verifying credentials,

any type of credential, your age that you've taken a specific exam, et cetera. And we were hot on this.

We said, wow, this is something that's going to be big, but we couldn't find a use case for it. We talked to exec after exec and nobody was willing to pay for it.

So we said, okay, nothing here, maybe later, but nothing here. And you move on.

And now it's AI and we're exploring not just productivity things, but actually AI powered services, because we have this,

we have this quote at the entrance of matrix group that comes from Kung Fu Panda. And it says, if you only do what you can do, you'll never be more than you are.

And it is when you enter the suite, that's what it says. If we just keep doing what we're doing, then eventually we become obsolete. So that's the reinvention.

And I, and I tell everybody, this is intentional. We're going to do it. Don't be afraid of the changes that we're going to make. You can be nervous.

You can express concerns, but just know that this is going to happen at matrix. If you only do what you can do, you'll never be more than you are.

Imagine if we had stuck to doing custom content management systems using cold fusion. Good God, where would we be today?

Alastair McDermottYeah. Yeah. it's, it's, it's entropy. It comes for us all. I interviewed Alan Weiss on my other podcast, recognising clarity.

And he's, he's a bit polarizing, but I asked him, you know, why he's polarizing, why he kind of pokes people. And he says, I poke people because people need to be poked.

If you're on a plateau, even if you're happy with the plateau, all plateaus erode because of the loss of entropy. So the only way you're going to be successful is to continue to grow.

So I thought that was really interesting. Love it. So, yeah. So, that was episode 62 of the recognised authority podcast. I'm going to check it out.

Joanna PinedaThank you. And I'll quote it to my team. There you go.

Alastair McDermottSo I have a couple of questions I like to ask people, and I think that you'd be pretty open.

I know I didn't prepare you for this one, but I like to talk to people about failure, particularly, you know, in business,

because it's something in my culture here in Ireland, we're not as accepting, I think, as they are in the business culture in the U S but I know that most successful people have a lot of

failures in their backstory. I'm just wondering, is there a business failure that you could tell me about and tell us what you learned from us?

Joanna PinedaMy God, we have failures all the time. I mean, I just told you about this pilot that we did with verifiable credentials. We poured money into it.

We actually had a prototype going and nobody was interested. Like everybody yawned when we talked about it. So we said, okay, like that was that a failure? I don't know. It's a failure.

Figure if you lost the company as a result, right? So as a business leader, you have to make calculated risks. And I actually, I don't bet big unless I really need to.

Like during the pandemic, when we doubled down on the virtual conference platform, we had to bet big because if we didn't bet big, then we were going to be out of business.

We couldn't do something kind of small and meek. The verifiable credentials project was small enough that if it didn't work out, we would absorb the loss, right?

The work that we did on the virtual conference platform was probably a million dollars of development in about nine months. So it had to work, right? But we also needed it to work.

So we've had failures like that. We've had failures related to losing a big account, right? And that hurts. And you have to say to your team, wow, how did that happen?

So we've definitely had failures like that. But even personally, I've had things happen where I thought, oh my God, how did that happen? I'll tell you just one story.

So when I was in grad school, there's something called the Presidential Management Internship Program, where if you're in grad school and you apply to the PMI program,

then there's a, there's kind of like a management track within the federal government where for two years, your salary is paid for by this program.

And so you can go to these different government agencies, you get fast-tracked. And at the end of it, you're like a GS, I don't know, 13 or something. And I was a really good student.

I had really good experience. I had good recommendations. And I didn't get in. It was mortifying because everybody I knew got in, but not Joanna. And I talked to my advisor.

I said, oh my God, Professor Holborn, how did this happen? And he said, I have no idea. I'm really surprised.

And I said, all right, well, like I hung my head low for weeks because I didn't get into the PMI program. And then, you know, my mom said, well, you know, things happen for a reason.

Clearly you're not meant to, you're not cut out from a job in government. Take this as a sign from God and go do something else. I mean, I've had lots of stories like that.

I can share them all day long.

Alastair McDermottYeah. Yeah. And I think it's, I think that's something that, you know, we see like people talk about overnight success.

You know, that's a phrase you hear in business or well, you hear it more in media, but like everybody in business, I think knows behind every overnight success,

there's 10 years of drudge and slogging and staying up late at night to get that success.

So I think, I think it's true that everybody who's successful has, you know, the success is built on a mountain of failures and learnings.

Joanna PinedaAbsolutely. I'll tell you a part, another personal story related to an overnight success. So I have a personal podcast. This is the craziest thing. You're going to laugh.

The personal podcast is about Korean dramas, right? Which is like this obsession of mine. So I don't know.

I decided before the work podcast, I want to learn how to podcast and I want to talk to people about Korean dramas.

So I started this little podcast and it was kind of like bumping along, you know, a little bit of traffic.

And then we decided that we were going to talk about queen of tears, which is this mega hit. It's like number one, all over Asia and other parts of the world.

And all of a sudden the traffic on the podcast is like hockey stick, right? So like, were we an overnight success? Oh God, I don't know.

After two years, we're finally getting some attention. So it was, it was, it was hard work. It was pure dumb luck that we picked a show that clearly the world was obsessed with. Yeah. Yeah.

Alastair McDermottI love it. And I love that you've got this personal podcast bit as well.

Joanna PinedaI know. If anybody listening loves Korean dramas or is curious about them, the podcast is called K-Drama Chat. It is so much fun.

Alastair McDermottAwesome. Joanna, I think I've, I've held you long enough. I really appreciate your time. If people are interested in learning more, where can they find you online?

Joanna PinedaThey can find me online on LinkedIn, Joanna Pineda. You can find me at my website, www.matrixgroup.net.

You can, gosh, there's a way to get in touch with me through the podcast, which is the, which is associations thrive. So lots and lots of ways to get in touch with me.

Alastair McDermottAwesome. And I will put links in the show notes as well to everything that we mentioned. Joanna Pineda, thank you so much for, for being.

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