Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Huber.
Kevin, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
CaveTech is a very interesting story of a struggling entrepreneur overcoming adversity by never giving up.
I discovered when I was very young that I had an insatiable curiosity about exploring every possible topic. I would explore diverse topics from robotics to programming.
As a young man, I had many dreams I wanted to pursue. As such, I had very strong ambitions and tended to take on very large projects. I completed many of these projects successfully; however, there was little time to complete them all. I was determined to follow my dreams and took time to explore every possible option to complete my pursuits. Looking back, I can see taking on multiple projects was very difficult to complete. Although at the time, I felt like I failed, I realized my insatiable curiosity and big dreams were monumental for someone so young.
Those early experiences helped me realize that my attitude about success was making it difficult to realize my dreams. Over time, I began to narrow the scope of my pursuits and change my vision of success. Now you might be wondering how I was able to change my attitude about success and gain the tools necessary to build my career? Believe me, it was a long road that has helped shape who I am today.
When I attended college, the classes offered were limited for my vision of a well-rounded successful education. Although in community college, I was able to learn C++ (e.g., a programming language) and other programming skills, but it wasn’t enough to satisfy my programming interests. My experiences at a 4-year university were more challenging, but I found myself independently studying various subjects to widen the scope of my programming skills.
I was passionate about computer knowledge and I spent a majority of my time outside of college researching and adding to my skills. My innate curiosity and drive to learn more about computer science provided me with a strong base to build my career. With this exploration, I sharpened my skills and laid the groundwork for my future success. CaveTech was created during a collaboration with a friend and colleague with the simple goal of making websites. Additionally, we worked with other developers to complete various projects and build a clientele base. This proved to be difficult as repeat clients are unheard of in the website design market.
I worked hard to complete these projects, but quickly realized that I needed to find a way to streamline the process of website development. I found I was spending a massive amount of time completing projects due to my novice skills, which was limiting my productivity. At this point, I was determined to meet the needs of my clients in a more efficient manner. Then, I met an interesting individual, who had become a mentor and good friend. He was a great intellectual friend to talk to and learn from. I worked together with his son developing websites for clients. When I was at the university I was taking entrepreneurship as a minor. With my freetime I was working on learning business through my role as CTO at CaveTech. I realized first-hand how difficult it was to make enough money to rise above the break-even point.
As a budding entrepreneur, I used my business experience and entrepreneurial skills, which I learned in college. Although college did help me establish a foundation in management, entrepreneurship, and business, I was struggling to make enough money to be a full-time entrepreneur. At that time, it was very tough to keep the company afloat with the business operations and marketing strategies and concurrently making a profit. At this point, I had time to evaluate what I could do to change my fiscal situation and move toward a more successful business path.
Fortunately, I had met an inspirational entrepreneur, who helped cultivate my passion for computer science and sharing his dissatisfaction with the state of corporate America. He introduced me to some businessmen, who gave me the opportunity to work for them. At first, I was nervous about working for such high level businessmen and I realized the weight of the responsibility placed on my shoulders. Although I knew that failure was a possibility, I told myself it was not an option. I realized that I have the necessary skills and can do anything I put my mind to do. I developed an “I can” philosophy and did whatever it took to make my clients happy (even if it took extra work or time) and to produce a quality product. This philosophy has served me well; I pay close attention to my clients needs and bring value to their company, while building my own company at the same time. One particular massive project I completed took 10,000+ hours to finish. Although this project was an incredible undertaking, I worked hard to find solutions for these complex challenges. I was faced with many trails with this project, but due to my continued effort and determination, I was able to push the limits of the work and create a successful product.
After this experience, I finally understood how to look at success and failure. I saw failure as a vehicle for learning and success as pushing through the limits and dissolving obstacles that I might face. At this point in my career, I can say that I have learned how changing your attitude and philosophy can impact your success in the business world. My greatest lesson was that dreams can enter the realm of possibility if you don’t give up. “Failure there is no failure. There is only stopping your efforts towards success or moving forward”. Success is a destination that can be achieved by not giving up on the journey. Although you may experience some failure, by celebrating small successes and learning through the journey, pursuing your dream will ultimately become a reality.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
It’s been rough trying to get the company off the ground. However, as with any worthwhile pursuit, there are bound to be bumps in road. It’s been a sacrifice working to cultivate and nurture my company. In the beginning, I underestimated the commitment required to build a successful business. I’ve heard stories about successful businesses; however, they typically focus on the success instead of the failures that were building blocks of the business. It’s one thing to understand the concepts of entrepreneurship and another to experience the highs and lows of the business first hand. In the real world, if you fail the costs are high. It can be difficult to recover. My business has had it’s share of struggles, which initially caused discouragement and slowed my forward momentum. But I have learned from these struggles; they refined my skills and increased my determination to succeed. The choices made were to focus on the services rendered but not the “growth” of the business. Although service quality is important, It’s equally important to receive fair compensation for the value you are providing your customer. Capacity for growth is stunted if you don’t have enough incoming profit. I found myself limited to taking on so many clients from the website design market while I was working for on my web application for my long term client with the big project. At some point something have to give as I didn’t have the capacity for all of these small projects from the website design market. Conversely, if I didn’t have a bigger project I would find I can have enough profit from the smaller projects to break-even. The other problem was I couldn’t get enough profit from the website design market as the expectations were so high. It felt like customers weren’t willing to pay for quality due to the dysfunctional nature of the market. I thought my only choice was to cheapen the quality of my services which I wasn’t willing to do. This is the single biggest problem with the market that every freelancer faces. The promised high quality services turn out so low-quality that customers have a bad experience and undervalue those services providers that do create high quality products.
When quoting the services, the customer often expects the cost to be “what everyone else charges,” even when the quality of that service is higher. I found it was a consistent customer expectation to have high quality services at a low cost. To give some background there are a lot of companies promising a high quality end-product but delivering a low quality product. To make matters worse theses companies have gotten really good at disguising the product to be high quality until it is really looked at closely. This was especially true on mobile devices. This was such a bad practice that customers would expect a high quality product at a low price as it appeared that this was what most companies were offering. A commonly branded phrase: “Mobile Ready” would be used. This term actually meant it wasn’t “mobile optimized” but rather “ready to be optimized”. This marketing trick along others help drive this market into the ground. From my experiences it was the worst market to find freelancing work. That make it difficult to have enough income for my company to survive. I had a long term stable client requesting web application development services. I learned a lot about a possible customer segment through this client, and they provided valuable information about a market I could explore. This was a very important discovery for my company as I was able to pivot my company towards providing something with both higher value and higher profit potential.
I had to make a very difficult decision to leave the market I had been a part of for so long, and it was a big step for me. I took a look at my expenses over the 3 years and I was shocked by the results being in the tens of thousands in loss. A tangible loss was the expenses, including: website UI toolkits, cost per image, premium plugins, hosting, mockups, and much more. This really reduced the income I would receive as I was spending 50% of the profit on expenses. It was very clear that I was not receiving fair value for the services I was rendering. It was difficult to recall my struggles in always being below the break-even point. I had several smaller web application clients that I felt undervalued my services. I honestly don’t blame them, as the market is telling them that this work should be easy and not cost that much. It’s actually appears to be so common that it’s adopted by nearly everyone, further reinforcing this idea as normal. Unless you talk to the experts in the field who charge the actual going market rate, you will get incorrect information. It’s mainly freelancing developers that are willing to complete low-quality products for a low price. I spotted an opportunity for growth at that moment, and I recognized what I needed to do to succeed was establish a new niche within a different market.
My companies went under a complete restructuring from the ground up. I took the highest value services I’ve rendered and completely removed the customer segment where customers prefered quick cost effective quality websites. I had to learn the hard way that customer segment wasn’t helping the growth of my business. I couldn’t let the competition define my prices as what I offer isn’t comparable to the competition. I don’t offer low-quality services, I only offer high-quality services. I can’t compare it to the competition’s services as my services are also very unique. My recommendation for anyone trying to figure out where they want to go is to focus on solving one problem at a time. You can’t solve every customer’s problems and you don’t gain anything from solving every problem. You become more valuable to your customers by solving a problem and solving it well. The increase of quantity doesn’t always mean increasing the quality of your services. Typically, it cheapens the value of the services you provide. Your niche might not work for a specific customer, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be everything for that customer. You have to know which projects fit and which ones don’t. Dismissing a request to render a service you don’t provide isn’t taking value away from your customer. Saying you don’t provide that service will prevent you from offering services you can’t offer at a high quality due to lack of experience. The customers want the best of what you have to offer, not for you to offer everything.
When I was saying “yes” to every common project, it was actually putting my company’s growth at risk. However, saying “yes” to everyone early on helped me figure out which clients fit my niche and which ones don’t. There were situations where the client’s expectations exceeded the value they provided. When a client requests more value for not enough compensation, sometimes a respectable “no” is the best response. It doesn’t make you a bad service provider rather, it shows that your services are valuable. Most of the time, clients will request to remove certain features to be flexible with you instead of devaluing your services. This is the best client-business relationship, and I had to learn this lesson first hand through my long term client. I also learned admitting when a mistake was made and taking ownership is required to secure the confidence in the quality and value provided. It’s easy to forget that like any relationship, a business-client relationship requires communication, conflict resolution, and equal give-and-take. These lessons shaped my entrepreneurial journey and shaped CaveTech into what it is today!
CaveTech Business Solutions – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
CaveTech focuses on creating innovative solutions for your business operations by creating custom web applications. Although we focus on operational efficiency we also develop products for your customers including Android apps, subscription services, and more.
CaveTech from a cost standpoint just makes sense as our tools can be used instead of Excel, apps with monthly subscriptions, and costly reporting tools. Everything can be managed from a dashboard where each app is an employee’s task to assist them with their daily operations.
CaveTech has been going through a large transition building the infrastructure and expanding its service offerings. One of the newest things we are working on is importing information from any account you might have. This includes but isn’t limited to: Importing contacts from Gmail, managing your files on Google Drive, and importing your Subscribers from your marketing applications. We also are working on adding a communication platform similar to slack with video.
We build custom web applications which a good comparison is software that doesn’t need to be installed. We work with clients identifying what tools they use like Excel, what processes they have in place, and how to make a more synergized process. Moving things from one software, tool, or app to another is very inefficient and slows down the operational process. Also, there is the cost for each piece of software per user which could be 5+ pieces of software per employee they have. This can be a very costly solution which can be solved with a web application.
We build software that works with your businesses process and enhances it by making employees job managed from a single dashboard. Each task is defined as an app and each task is laid out in the most efficient way. We don’t take a traditional data entry approach we reduce data entry as much as we can by finding the best way of collecting the data. We provide integrations such as importing your contacts from Gmail or Outlook into your web application.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
The key to success is experiencing and understanding failure as a necessary step toward success. The best lesson I’ve learned was through failure. The journey towards success requires overcoming obstacles caused by making misinformed decisions that we brand as failures. It’s better to look at failure as an aspect of the journey and a necessary part of success. This way we don’t get stuck once faced with an obstacle.
I’ve realized my problem is actually much simpler: “Never Give Up”. Now success isn’t this impossible thing. It’s about overcoming our obstacles not letting them prevent us from moving forward. I experienced this through starting my first company. It was the hardest journey with many obstacles. The assumption was any market is a good market but I had to learn my market is so heavily competitive that it was what was hindering me towards achieving success. I had to push through this obstacle and move my company into a new niche market with less competition and more long term growth opportunities. If I didn’t really take a look and learn from my failure I would be doomed to repeat it. My company would still be below the break even point and I would wonder why I was stuck. I’m very happy I made the decision to change my services as it was the best decision I made towards the success of my company.
We focus too much on the destination of success that we lose sight of the journey. If we stop moving forward we won’t make it to our destination which is being successful. Your experiences of failure prepare you and teach you which direction to go towards success and which paths to avoid. I haven’t met too many people with this point of view and I wish more people could embrace it: “failure is a prerequisite to success.” If you don’t learn it’s the lesson you have to retake the lesson over and over and I wish for people to be saved from that cycle. I hope this resonates with people who are also entrepreneurs sharing my experiences with failure as I know with entrepreneurship it is the hardest lesson.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.cave.tech
- Phone: 6309998490
- Email: kevin@cavetech.website
- Facebook: facebook.com/cavetechinc
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cave_tech
- Other: https://bookme.name/cavetech
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