Meet Jon LoDuca | Founder and CEO

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jon LoDuca and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jon, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I started my first business in 1993. It was a .com and I built it for the same reason I’ve built every business since…We saw a market opportunity and thought we could serve others.

But PlaybookBuilder has a funny sort of heritage story. When it was created in 2009 I was already running an intellectual capital development firm that I had started many years earlier. For that company we were interviewing the top quarter percent income-earning entrepreneurs in the US, UK, and Canada to help them develop clarity around core process in their business.

So I was blessed to interview some of the smartest and most successful business owners in the English-speaking world. And while we were in the midst of interviewing – I think it was the Ziglar family – it dawned on me that maybe we should be filming them! They’re all story tellers certainly and rather good ones!

And so that is how PlaybookBuilder was born – it was the idea of matching a video narrative along with an operations manual. Pretty obvious looking back, but at the time… well it was pretty obvious then too.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
About:

PlaybookBuilder is an AI-powered business process software. It’s really the first of its kind. We help organizations to capture and share the best practices and wisdom of their people so they can run harder, faster, and reduce organizational chaos.

But what makes PlaybookBuilder great is what people put inside of it. The stories and insights, the real wisdom of their organization expressed through the processes. With PlaybookBuilder they have a place to capture that, and can enjoy a competitive advantage that’s totally homegrown. Most small businesses aren’t being beaten by the competition, they’re dying from friendly fire. What they need are processes to run on and that’s where we help.

So as a huge fan of small businesses and the people inside of them, we love giving them a competitive advantage they’ve had all along…their own wisdom served up in a way that makes them risk tolerant, faster, and more consistent.

Last week we announced at the EOS Worldwide Conference in Indianapolis our integration with chatGPT. This extraordinary machine learning model enables PlaybookBuilder users to create business processes now in seconds, instead of days.

How’d we get here?

PlaybookBuilder’s story is a pretty typical one. It was a 10 year-old overnight sensation. We built the product in 2009 and added our own clients to it from a consulting business I own. We thought it was a pretty neat idea and took it to market, but the market did not agree with us. So we waited. And we waited.

We tried it again a few years later, and still no interest. So we shelved it but I simply couldn’t let it go. I just couldn’t believe it wasn’t some thing the market wanted. So instead of shelving it permanently, we just let it Idle on the sidelines.

In 2018 things started to change. And by 2020 the world was craving a solution that would allow a distributed workforce to stay aligned and united. It was our window. We grew exponentially from 2020 onward.

On a personal note, this is one of those examples where someone perseveres in the face of adversity and finally gets the validation that their idea had merit all along. But it could’ve been a story where I was being told by God or the universe to let it go and wouldn’t listen. There were many nights when I wondered if “stubborn” was a virtue or a vice. My wife would tell you she thought it was a distraction. Now I get to say, I told you so!

Lessons:

If given the opportunity to speak to other entrepreneurs about building a business, my advice would orient around the nature of product design. Listening with heart to the user takes extraordinary humility, and diligence. Every single time I stopped listening, and thought to myself, oh, I’ve got it… I didn’t.

Staying open, and investing the time to really understand a problem deeply before building a product is now a lost art. There’s a school of thought out there that you should generate a million ideas and hurl them at the market but there’s another way to go about it. Listen to people. Spend time with them. Develop a fact pattern and start to test it. Because we didn’t rush out and raise money we had to go slowly and methodically. We had to listen intently and once we got it right, we had it.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to dedicate my shout out to two people that have had an incredible impact on me. I’m going to have to shout quite loudly because both of them are dead.

One is my father who was an immigrant and took America up on the opportunity like so many do. He climbed out of poverty and really made something for himself and our family and built two successful businesses along the way. He showed me what hard work looked like, and what having integrity in the working world can do for your reputation.

And the second person is a man named Dan Taylor who was my mentor. Dan recognized what I was before I did, and started feeding me books and introduced me around and brought me into the world of entrepreneurism. I wouldn’t be here without his help. He was a dear friend, and is sorely missed.

Website: playbookbuilder.com

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonloduca/