Bill Wagnon – Founder and CEO, SelectView Data Solutions LLC
Gosia Motyka (interviewer, SelectView Marketing Administrator) – I don’t think I am the only person who is interested in your story and the founding of SelectView, so I would like to ask you a few questions….
Bill Wagnon (Founder, SelectView Data Solutions) – I’m happy to share it with you, but I will say this is my first time getting interviewed…. let’s get started then!
How was the idea to establish SelectView Data Solutions born?
I’d been doing some Crystal Reports and Vista for a while. I was doing SQL and automation too.
I didn’t have anyone to learn from. I felt a little like I wasn’t going to do things the right way without someone better than me to point out when I was doing something dumb. I started looking, I remember in the interview saying ‘I want someone to tell me when I f*** up’, they laughed; I was dead serious. I got the job. It was SSRS reporting.
Then some of the Vista customers I used to help kept calling me. I was working on Crystal Reports at 5 am at the kitchen table. Or having a phone meeting in the parking lot at 7.
Karen and I talked about it, I wanted to go part-time but my employer said no, so I quit and set up a website and all of that. All I had was really my name, so the company started out as billwagnon, all one word.
Do you remember the moment when you decided that this was the idea worth developing?
That was a few months in. I thought I was pretty good at the Vista stuff, and I thought if I was that good I should be able to show someone else how to do it. Then there would be two of us and we could do more.
Really I like doing tough things and being needed. I thought two of us would be able to get further. We got an office at the co-working center and painted and put up art work in that tiny little office.
So what happened then?
Oh it was tough. We were so small, and when you’re that small every little change is a big deal. The risks are smaller but everything then was a big deal. It was kind of fun too, building something every day. We met some great people who are still around, like our lawyer Karen met in a beer line at the co-working space.
Karen came on board because she was already running a reporting team. She built the parts I was missing, necessary stuff like taxes and the ticket system. All the real stuff.
What was the biggest challenge at the beginning of the business?
Entirely people. I was bad at finding the right people. I was bad at leading things. I really thought if I just worked hard enough that we would build a big team fast. Customers are actually pretty easy.
Building a team from the trenches up was so tough for me, I didn’t really know how to be in charge at the same time I was working. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I let a lot of people down. I guess I learn through pain. I know now what it feels like with some people, and that is what I go for now in interviews. But still hiring is a huge risk.
Who first came up with the name “SelectView”? Was there some kind of brainstorming, or was it more like… a daze over coffee?
Oh, we knew we had to come up with a different name. Our original name was billwagnon LLC. I wanted the company to be about more than just me, something bigger.
So, we changed our name to Global Report Options because we were doing a lot of reports and wanted something that sounded wide ranging. “Global” turned out to be a very generic term, and it just wasn’t working. People kept confusing us with other companies.
I remember we worked with Craig Workman and Les Landes in a room down in Soulard with a whiteboard, throwing words around. ‘SelectView’ was one of the names we put together.
What I really liked about Select is that all of our SQL statements start with it: SELECT fields FROM table – it’s the technical core of what we do.
And then View – well, I’ve always said what we do has to be technical. Yes, we need to get the data out – but the view is how it looks to the eye. Is it pleasing? Is the design good?
So SelectView became this combination: technical precision and aesthetic clarity. We’re selecting the right data, and we’re showing it in a way that looks good.
Because if the view is just a wall of text, no one wants to use it.
Later I figured out ‘KeyStyle’ was pretty much the same thing.
Who is the technical head of the company and who is the man with vision?
Um, we aren’t really set up like that. I started it a while back, but the company is me, Karen, and Radek. There is a lot of overlap. We used to talk about everything and probably spent too much time talking about it all. Lately we are just too busy and have to fill in each other after things happen.
Karen’s role is keeping us out of jail. Radek’s is keeping us in line and making good things. Sometimes we get a little risky, or don’t think things through enough.
My role is more about getting things out of the way or in place. I just want it all to work, and to be a good place to work. A lot of my goal is to be a place where we are the best for each other, then we can be the best for the customers.
How did you manage to combine the work of the US and Polish team? Where did the idea for an international team come from in the first place?
What happened was – Tina Helmsing at Guarantee Electrical in St. Louis asked me to do something that I had sort of done a while back with ASP.Net, but I wanted to do it right and watched a bunch of YouTube videos on MVC6 or something, it was the newest, and just got stuck, and still had a lot of regular work to do.
We were at the co-working center, and someone suggested Upwork. I found three developers and gave them the same task. Radek was one of them. His tagline on Upwork was, “A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to”.
And he was right and the whole experience was great. So, the Polish connection really came from that moment, finding someone who was a lot better than me and got things done for Tina. By the way that system is still running!
What did you do before founding SelectView? Did your previous work experience help you build your company?
I started college in aerospace engineering. I liked airplanes but was more suited for English or art. I did okay but then the math got tough. And I could see I might end up in a cubicle drawing parts, and my drafting was really bad. So I switched over to Industrial/Organizational Psychology.
My interest in psychology was first – I didn’t always get ‘people’. I wanted to understand more. I’m still working on that! I miss a lot, Karen says I don’t read between the lines.
The industrial side I think was because my father worked at a refinery. The union had swing shifts – overnights, then days, then evenings. It changed every week. I think that’s where my ideas about work started, we have to do it – but maybe it shouldn’t be bad for us.
So we spend a lot of our lives at work.
And work experience?
Well, when I got out of school I couldn’t find a job very fast. I was looking for something in HR. My first real job was at a brokerage, first just filing papers, and then I got into pensions and 401k plans.
So there was balancing of accounts and reconciling things. There were always these tedious tasks – trying to find a missing 50 cents. We’d use a red pen and just go: screen, paper, screen, paper.
That’s when I started figuring out automation. I liked solving those problems – just to get rid of that kind of boring work. I got into Crystal Reports, Excel and then I learned to work with data and SQL. Then my co-workers saw what I was doing, and that it was better than the old way. So, I began automating for the entire Team.
Have you ever imagined running a business with a life partner? What are the pros and cons of this fact?
Working with Karen is great. She has a lot more to put up with than I do!
She handles so many things I don’t even know about. When she started it was like six months of ‘did you ever send this file to the IRS?’. I say she keeps us out of jail.
Probably a good pro is that we can check in just about any time. If something is bothering us we just talk about it. But sometimes you just need a break from work. And sometimes I can’t stop talking things out.
She has a lot of faith in me. When things are tough that makes all the difference. If a smart person has faith in you, you can’t let them down. So you work harder and figure it all out.
One thing I like is that we are working together on this big project and see a lot of the same stuff, so I feel like she knows my world. And she fills me in on the stuff I don’t see.
Do you see your company in 5 or 10 years as a much larger enterprise, or do you want to maintain the intimate nature of the team?
Both – if we’re going to say we’re good at something, we should be able to do the big things and keep the good parts of a small team.
