Speaker 0 | 00:00.000
I think it really honestly does start with culture. I know that’s a big buzzword where people are talking about culture, culture, culture. But I think it’s and it starts at the top, right? Nobody wants that overbearing boss who’s micromanaging, standing over your shoulder and saying, get this done, get this done, get this done, with unrealistic timeframes and somebody that doesn’t understand.
Speaker 1 | 00:28.344
All right. Welcome, everyone, back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have the vendor whisperer on the line. I love this. Adam Morton. I would say senior network manager, senior meaning a big deal, at CKE Restaurants Incorporated. And you give the rundown of what mastery, of what a master list of… I would call fine dining. And I’m really not being sarcastic here because if you knew where I took my wife out last night, I was like, this is fine dining tonight. We were at the mall in the food court last night. But there’s a place for everything. What is the CKE restaurants? Give me the rundown because it is an amazing list.
Speaker 0 | 01:14.515
So CKE restaurants, we own Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. But our parent company, War Capital, owns a plethora of quick serve restaurants and franchise businesses in general. The highlights are Arby’s, Dunkin’Donuts, Baskin Robbins. Into the casual dining, we have Buffalo Wild Wings. Rourke also owns Sonic and a bunch of other ones that I’m forgetting. Forgive me.
Speaker 1 | 01:40.731
All near and dear to my heart. I’m such a roller coaster and people know. I am somewhat of a health, I would like to call myself a health nut. And I bounce back and forth between carnivore diet and keto. And then it just takes one. It just takes one faltering for me. And then it’s like way off the deep end for at least a month. You know, last night it was, let’s see, a double cheeseburger with, and then like a chicken club on top of that with cheese fries. It was just, it was bad. It just, I fell off the deep end. So anyways, but I’m not trying to, I’m not trying to disparage the brand whatsoever. Believe me, it’s quite the opposite. So don’t get me wrong, but the, um. You are so, so network manager, but what is that? That could be how many stores are you in charge of? I mean, it’s gotta be quite a plethora,
Speaker 0 | 02:37.753
right? So we corporately support about 800 restaurants domestically.
Speaker 1 | 02:43.458
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 02:44.239
And then the rest of them, they support themselves. We have a little bit different of a support model than most franchised businesses do. We don’t require our franchisees to be supported by us, but they can.
Speaker 1 | 02:55.892
Right. So if they really are into like technology and managing their own technology, they can do that on their own is what you’re saying? Correct.
Speaker 0 | 03:02.654
We, yes, we have some franchisees who have, you know, two, 300 restaurants and they have their own IT staff. It’s more economical for them to do it. But when we look at the, you know, the, the bulk of our franchisees who own one to five restaurants, it doesn’t really make much sense for them to have full-time IT people.
Speaker 1 | 03:16.840
And are you guys doing reporting for them, providing software, all that type? Are you guys a menu link company? What do you guys use for, for? you know, counting food at the end of the night and stuff like that.
Speaker 0 | 03:29.065
Our back office, we use a system called crunch time and that integrates with our par brain POS system.
Speaker 1 | 03:34.507
Okay. Okay. The, I only know a little bit. I only, I was only in restaurants two decades ago and it was Starbucks fazoles, which you have heard of. We called that fast. What did we call that fast casual? Cause we had a drive through, we had a drive through, but you could still order food and get a number and pick it up inside the restaurant. And it was. really everyone wanted unlimited breadsticks and garlic butter which was amazing i was thinking about that now probably should have ate before before i got on the show so they call you the vendor whisperer why sometimes
Speaker 0 | 04:09.120
you have to keep your vendors in line and hold them accountable um you know i it’s a big part of my job because we we’re paying we we have a couple of vendors that actually you do our level one level two support at the restaurant level we don’t have to have a big a big knock corporately and you you have to have you have to hold them accountable um you have to you know trust but verify like i say i like to wear a belt and suspenders to hold my pants up yes yes that is trust but verify the last time i heard that was from a burger king guy believe
Speaker 1 | 04:38.336
it or not and when when i was at starbucks and he moved to starbucks and uh it was trust but verify it’s not that yes anyways anyone that knows that saying knows what it means it’s definitely the okay so keep going so you have we what we would say like outsourced help desk msp something like that for like what level one tickets and stuff like that
Speaker 0 | 05:00.668
Level one, level two. So if the internet connection goes down or an AP or switch goes down, they’re the ones calling the restaurant and trying to do the first line troubleshooting. And then if they determine that the device is bad, then they’ll start their RMA process. Or if they determine that the internet is a carrier issue, they’ll actually call the carrier and work with the carrier to get things resolved.
Speaker 1 | 05:21.857
So back to the vendor whispering and keeping them in line. And you follow. This, I mean, this is really what I do for a day job anyways. I’ve been in, I guess you would call it carrier agnostic vendor advisorship role slash CSP on steroids for like the last, you know, two decades. And that’s kind of what I do as a day job. And that’s really entirely what I do is keep vendors in line, make sure that we, I don’t know, say. hitting them against each other is really the right word. That’s not it because they, cause we all know how to play in the same sandbox, so to speak. Nowadays, most vendors know, you know, don’t come with this type of pricing. Don’t come with auto renewals in your contracts. Don’t come with, um, the non chronic outage addendum on your 99, five, nine SLA, which we all know is, I was laughing about that earlier with someone else. Like, but they said they have five nines. I was like, if they don’t have five nines and they have, if they’re even off by like an eight or if they’re like. like four nines and an eight that’s really really bad you realize that right because there’s so many circuits all over the world and they’re averaging it all together and saying here’s our downtime so to speak like that did i just ramble for too long okay so as so as the vendors that you have and any uh best practices on on keeping vendors in check i mean you have to have systems right i mean we would like to think that
Speaker 0 | 06:52.484
We can just hand it off to them and trust that they’re monitoring everything, keeping everything up as they should. But, you know, one thing that we do is we do our own monitoring, right? We have our own internal monitoring tools and we say, hey, you know, why is this circuit? We’re showing this circuit has been down for 10, 20, 30 days. You don’t have a ticket open. Why is that? Right. And so that brings us into automation, which is near and dear to my heart because I don’t have time to manually do all this stuff. So we have. in-house automation tools that I wrote to, to check that stuff and, and, and keep the counters going and basically say, okay, this isn’t, you don’t even have a ticket over for this. Why, or why has this been down for so long? And what’s the problem here? And oftentimes there’s not oftentimes, sometimes what we’ll see is that, you know, they’ve called the restaurant and nobody’s willing to help them out or they’ve tried and tried and tried. And I’m like, okay, you know, that’s fine, but you need to let us know so we can step in and help you. But again, you just have to, to keep them accountable. And, you know, You never put all your eggs in one basket, in my opinion. You always need to have options. So as a boss of mine once told me, you know, you get a quote or you may it may never come to bear. But at least you have leverage.
Speaker 1 | 08:07.539
Yes. Many thoughts going through my mind. The first thing I want to ask you was just general. You mentioned circuits and circuits going down and you’ve got, you know, whatever. 800 plus locations. So I’m assuming you have backup internet or tertiary secondary backup internet?
Speaker 0 | 08:28.812
Yes, we will, where it’s feasible, we have a primary terrestrial broadband, and then we have the LTE backup.
Speaker 1 | 08:36.116
Gotcha. Some kind of like, I don’t know, SD WAN, bandwidth aggregation type of device on site? Or are you guys doing your own kind of firewall thing? Or what are you doing?
Speaker 0 | 08:48.223
We’re full stack Meraki.
Speaker 1 | 08:49.563
Okay. So I like to call that SD-WAN Lite. I did a show, I don’t know, like six months ago. It was called Meraki. I hate you because. It was, of course, for all Meraki people that love Meraki, but it was like, why do I hate you? Right. Which is great. Okay, so we’ve got LTE backup. That makes sense. Now, when you say a circuit’s down, are you saying like the primary circuit was down or at a. at a restaurant and what were they running off of LTE and it was 30 days and no one noticed and how are we getting that managing monitoring alerts on a circuit just curious right yes so that was that has been the case several times um and
Speaker 0 | 09:34.213
one of our vendors was not doing a good job at managing the circuits they were relying on uh relying on the Meraki alerts that come from the Meraki dashboard that’s just a horrible way to to monitor circuits. So we have since, they have since found a better way via the API to monitor that kind of stuff. But yeah, it was just, they not real sure what was going through their heads there, but that’s what was happening.
Speaker 1 | 09:59.552
Well, sometimes we find with, you know, especially MSPs that manage a lot of Merakis, a lot. That’s actually particularly what the episode was actually about, was large MSPs that manage tons of Meraki endpoints and how difficult that can be, even if you have to, like, you know, push a change out across the entire environment. So. But the thing is, is that MSPs can get maybe complacent on a day-to-day basis. Used to, you know, the check, the bills getting paid every month. And like you said, maybe this is the metaphor when my son was writing a little lawn mowing letter to the neighborhood, which is the first cut or the hundredth cut, the hundredth cut will be as good as the first cut. Does that make sense?
Speaker 0 | 10:59.984
Yes, as it should be.
Speaker 1 | 11:01.165
And maybe that’s where some of our vendors, that’s where the trust but verify comes into place, which is how do we keep people accountable or even just performing at the level that they’re supposed to be performing at.
Speaker 0 | 11:18.592
Correct.
Speaker 1 | 11:19.432
So Vendor Whisperer, you said you do a lot with telecom. You’re wearing a Cisco headset. You got that for free. What do we, how many phones do we? I can’t imagine the restaurants having that many phones anymore. I mean, I remember the phone in the back room when I was, you know, in the back room at the manager’s desk and like maybe there was one up front and that was back and that was a long time ago. That was back when phones, landlines were still important.
Speaker 0 | 11:43.324
Right. So today landlines are in our business. They’re not as important as they used to be, although they’re about to get important again due to online ordering. And if you order through our website. Uh, and you, and you get it delivered. If you have a problem, you don’t call DoorDash or you don’t call the breach. You have to call the restaurant. So it’s kind of coming full circle where it’s important. Uh, we just had a big project. We, we got rid of all of our landlines and went to a, a void based solution. So each restaurant has a one phone or one, one phone line, uh, one phone base and two cordless handsets.
Speaker 1 | 12:16.984
Hmm. I’d like to take a guess. You think I could guess like Rumpelstiltskin within three guesses who you went with? I wonder. Next. Next Eva.
Speaker 0 | 12:26.064
Nope.
Speaker 1 | 12:27.165
Um, let’s see. You don’t need, you have no need. Do you have need for video conferencing or anything like that in the stores? Does anyone do anything like that?
Speaker 0 | 12:35.411
No, but we went with the same system for our corporate office and our restaurants.
Speaker 1 | 12:40.154
Ooh, how big is the corporate office in the corporate, in the, in the corporate office? 800. Wow. Um, well, man. And well, You wouldn’t do Teams for a store. So it’s got to be RingCentral or Zoom.
Speaker 0 | 12:58.739
Yep, RingCentral.
Speaker 1 | 12:59.740
Oh, I’m good. See, would have gotten it. They’ll take it. And fully rolled out. Did you guys just roll that out or is it all done?
Speaker 0 | 13:12.090
November of last year.
Speaker 1 | 13:13.591
Super. I like RingCentral.
Speaker 0 | 13:16.914
Yeah, it was good. We POC’d a bunch of vendors. Zoom, at the time, Zoom was very infant. And they’re in the stage of…
Speaker 1 | 13:25.120
They’re still infant. They’re still infant.
Speaker 0 | 13:27.901
Yeah, their phone offering just wasn’t where we needed it to be at the time. So we decided to go with Ring Central.
Speaker 1 | 13:32.903
The Zoom piece is good. Infant on maybe the rolling out of the phones. They’re getting there. They’re getting there. We all know why they did it. The big breakup. Yeah. Big breakup between them and Ring Central. Yep. I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about that. They’re both huge, massive vendors of mine. So I love them both. I love you both of you guys. And half of my old colleagues all have, you know, I came from a telecom background for years in telecom. So, and most of them went to, so many of them went to, are at RingCentral now, or Comcast or any of the other, we call them usual suspects. Okay. Was there any vendor whispering when it came to RingCentral?
Speaker 0 | 14:15.430
Not really. I’ll be honest with you. They did a really good job as we had them, you know, TM. project manage all the porting and all that kind of stuff. To be honest, I was really impressed. They gave us a very, we gave them a very aggressive timeline. And I’m back in my head. I’m like, there’s no way they’re going to meet this timeline.
Speaker 1 | 14:36.205
Meanwhile, sales are up. What’s it going to take to earn a business today? And you’re like, well, I need this rolled out in 30 days.
Speaker 0 | 14:45.712
It was about 45, to be honest.
Speaker 1 | 14:49.134
He’s like, hold on one second. Let me make a phone call. Oh, yeah, it’s approved. We got it.
Speaker 0 | 14:54.408
One or two mom and pop.
Speaker 1 | 14:56.819
stragglers to get ported out but for the most part they i mean they killed it so yeah no if they have to and they’ve got a really good what most people don’t the people that don’t like ring central are typically maybe a small business owner or someone that’s just under the cusp where they’re kind of really managing it on their own and they aren’t getting really the special support and the special help that they would get the enterprise level support um but when you when you hit that next tier they really roll out the red carpet for you and do a good job
Speaker 0 | 15:24.147
Well, it wasn’t free nor was it cheap, so we didn’t pay for it. No,
Speaker 1 | 15:27.609
no, no. You’re paying for sure. You’re good. Remember PayTac? Did you ever remember a company called PayTac back in the day?
Speaker 0 | 15:35.956
I did not.
Speaker 1 | 15:36.557
They took PayTac became, I think, Windstream. Did they become Windstream? I think PayTac. I don’t remember Windstream. But the big joke was like, you’re going to pay. It’s in the name of the company, PayTac, which is good. So talk to me. In general, as IT leader, how did you get started out in IT? Let’s do this. What was your first computer?
Speaker 0 | 16:03.404
First computer was an 8088. It didn’t even have a name on it. So the way I got started, my mother worked at an H&R Block when I was younger, or still does, actually, when I was younger. And the owner had a computer shop in the back. And so during the summertime, you know, they only work two days a week, so I would just go to work with her. instead of going to a babysitter and he said well if you’re going to be here i’m going to teach you something cool i’m like all right cool and so you know this was back in like load windows load windows into this machine here’s uh 30 decks ms dos started with ms dos even better even better yeah ms dos yep and so uh so that’s kind of where i got my start and just building you know back then there was no Dell. You had to know somebody to get the parts and put them together. There was no internet either. I lived in North Georgia. We would order our stuff out of Atlanta and get shipped to us. We’d put stuff together and all that kind of stuff. Then from there…
Speaker 1 | 17:03.409
That was the fun day. That was really the fun time. Ordering stuff, putting computers together. You skipped over that we didn’t have internet back then. It still amazes me. It still amazes me. I had computers for years with no internet, just no internet.
Speaker 0 | 17:20.293
Vividly remember the first time I saw a CD-ROM, this doctor in town had bought it and it was a couple hundred dollars just for the, or I think it was about $800 just for the CD-ROM. Read only. Yep. Read only. And we had this, this disc. And I remember it was showing, it was talking about how the heart worked and it showed this heart beating, this animation of a heart beating. And we saw that was so cool. And I was like, yeah, well. How far have we come since then?
Speaker 1 | 17:47.215
Fourth grade. I remember fourth grade. Jim Sims. He had the catalog. He was cool enough to like, his parents were like, you know, like they’re nerdy enough. They got it. My dad was a doctor. So we had a computer, but it wasn’t as like, mine was Apple IIc. No, our first was Texas Instruments, Texas Instruments. Then it was Apple IIc. Pong. We had Pong before that. You wouldn’t really call that a computer, but it’s unforgettable. When you have to attach something with a screwdriver to a TV, we’ve just come so far. So, okay, so CD-ROM, I just remember Myst for some reason. It just seemed like that was the game that came with Gateway and all the CD-ROMs for a while, during the early 90s or mid-90s, I guess. No, early 90s. So anyways, in the back of the shop, he’s having you load DOS. What did he teach you? And this is the computer shop owner? this was the owner of the hr block who just happened to have a computer shop in the back of the hr block was it a computer shop like another store like a retail type store or you just had a like a shop the back area where we put things together and people would bring their stuff in to get it fixed so
Speaker 0 | 18:59.115
uh yeah we were just he taught me what a motherboard was what a cpu was memory case power supply all that um how to put it all together how to hook all the you know the ide cables up and then and all that kind of stuff. There’s no, you know, zero ATA or anything like that. No solid state back then. So just basically here’s a computer. Here’s how you assemble it. Here’s how you, back then you had to do F disk and then you would, then you would load the operating system on there. And, you know, we would load whatever programs on there that the customer needed. He did a lot of computers for the H&R blocks in the surrounding area. So we would load the tax software on there, get the server ready. And this was back when there was no, so. Ethernet cable. It was all well, it was Ethernet. It was the the coax cable, right? Yeah, and it would go down you go down the line and if the computer in the middle went down the whole
Speaker 1 | 19:50.701
Segment they on such it’s like literally hubs like when hubs Yeah think it’s it’s quite mind-blowing to to really think about do you think that people growing up in technology now really understand the how a computer works like kind of in depth or they just kind of like we’re just going to start off from at the top up here and just you know not really like do you think there’s a deep appreciation for like the history of computers and how it works yeah i think it’s more of a you
Speaker 0 | 20:23.498
I’m going to get this thing. I’m going to turn it on and I expect it to work. I don’t really care how it works or what it took to get here or how, how good we have it today. You know, it’s like, you see the memes on the internet all the time. Kids today will never know the pain of wow for blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1 | 20:37.468
Or the long telephone cord, just the long cord from the rotary dial phone. Like when we were cleaning out my dad’s house, there was all kinds of the old four prong. Like the way you plugged the phone in was like literally four prongs. It wasn’t an RJ 11, like, like a little plastic thing. Okay. Right. So at that point, were you like, I’m just going to do, no one actually knew that you could do computers for a living back then. Well, I guess you could, if it was H and R block and you’re putting computers together and fixing things, selling stuff, then it was real back then. It was more of a, and you’re in retail now. So now that makes complete sense. But how did you progress?
Speaker 0 | 21:19.606
So I did that through high school, and then I went off to college the first time. And I moved down to Atlanta to go to school, and then I got a help desk job at Georgia Pacific. And I think anybody getting into IT young in their career, I would highly recommend starting at the help desk so you can figure out kind of what’s going on there. It really helped me a lot to know the ins and outs of the computer and stuff like that. Um, and then from there, well, I want to be,
Speaker 1 | 21:48.743
what do you, what do you remember failing at? Cause sometimes I have to do something for my business. Like I had to migrate, I don’t know, uh, some like G suite accounts the other day, like to a whole new domain. And I had to, and I forget how painful it is to do MX records and like, and, but I’m using cloud flare and I’ve, oh, I forgot to change something here. And why is this not working? Oh. And I forgot to delete this email alias over here. And it’s like a nightmare for someone like me. But is that the type of experience you get from a help desk job or like what what would it be like? Do you remember any moment where you were completely just did not know anything, but you learned something?
Speaker 0 | 22:29.895
Not specifically. I was more of like a desk side support, not not on the phone help desk type person. But but really, it helped me because, you know, down the road, anything in I.T. has to do with a computer, whether you’re you’re in networking, whether you’re a sysadmin, whether you’re a DBA, whether you’re a. a programmer or what have you. So it’s good to know the fundamentals of the computer in general. And you get that when you’re on that, you know, level two, level three support, or, you know, desktop support for any company. You know, it just baffles me that I’m talking to DBAs. I’m like, hey, what’s your IP address? And they say, well, what’s an IP address?
Speaker 1 | 23:08.097
Come on.
Speaker 0 | 23:08.798
How do you, or, you know, what’s the IP address on your computer? And they’re like, well, how do I find that? I’m thinking to myself, oh my gosh. How do you not, you know, so I think everybody, you know, if you’re going to get into IT, I highly recommend starting with that level, you know, that that’s that support. Get a good foundation of, you know, Windows, Mac OS, whatever, whatever you feel you want to go into. And then from there, you can kind of figure out what you want to do. And, you know, a lot of people I talk to young in their career. So, you know, get into InfoSec or how to get into this. How do I get that? I always tell them, you know, start at the bottom, start at the help desk or the, you know, desktop support. Find the people. in the group that you want to get into and go talk to them. Because most of the time, the IT people, they’re happy to jabber about this stuff all day long. Learn from them. And then when a position comes open, maybe they’ll let you in, right? It’s really hard to jump into, you know, these, I’m going to call them higher level positions, whether it be, you know, a DBA, a sysadmin, a network person, or what have you, with no experience. So, and that’s always my recommendation to, you know, get in and go find the people that you want to learn from and ask them to teach you.
Speaker 1 | 24:15.357
Yeah. I literally networking human networking also. What about the um It is kind of scary actually how much people don’t know about technology that aren’t in technology I don’t know how I don’t think i’ve ever really talked about that. I think we notice it when When Mark Zuckerberg is on trial, I think that’s when we notice it. I think we notice it when we watch old, I was watching the old Microsoft. YouTube, like the old, like when Microsoft monopoly government, whatever it was, and Bill Gates is being interviewed and they’re like, do you know what that means? He’s like, yeah, I think I know what it means. He’s like, I’d be guessing, you know, but they’re like asking him, no, what does API mean? He’s like, yes, applicant, you know? And, um, so, and when I speak with some of my family members as well, just that aren’t in technology, they’re in, a lot of them are in healthcare. They should know. a lot about what’s going on in technology, but they’re in healthcare or they aren’t connected in a certain way. The world’s just becoming such a weird division. And I think technology has a lot to do with this level of communication.
Speaker 0 | 25:40.517
Yeah. The more and more connected we become, the more and more disconnected we become, in my opinion. I mean, you know, we’ve got, pick your social media platform at your fingertips, but Less and less are we having that personal one or personal interaction with people right? I mean how many times? And I’m guilty of this tubes people would rather text you that pick up the phone to call you Or they would rather send you an email. I’m old-school. I like to pick up the phone.
Speaker 1 | 26:03.747
I love the phone I love the phone. It’s one of the reasons why I make this show audio only love the phone
Speaker 0 | 26:11.710
Again, I love to talk to but some people Some time you get a call and you’re like shocked you’re like dude you called me
Speaker 1 | 26:20.606
You know, like I think it’s another thing to you being the vendor whisperer. Back in the day, it used to be like so many calls. Your phone was ringing off the hook. There’s voicemails left all the time. Do you get that as much anymore? Or do you get a bunch of emails and spam? Or do you get more email and spam?
Speaker 0 | 26:41.640
I get more emails and spam than I do calls. I used to get a lot of calls because I think the old telecom guy, when I first came to CK, I don’t think he liked me. Uh, because he gave me the, the, the old VP’s phone number. And, and apparently that guy would just pick up the phone and talk to anybody and say, Hey, come on in, you know, pitch your product to me. And so I think I called for months. Uh,
Speaker 1 | 27:02.769
nice.
Speaker 0 | 27:04.190
But, uh, I don’t, I don’t answer the phone. If people call me, honestly, unless I recognize the number.
Speaker 1 | 27:11.772
Sometimes I, sometimes like, it just depends on the mood I’m in. Sometimes, sometimes people get me at the right time and I’m just like, yeah, fire away. Let’s see what you got, man. uh it’s because it’s always like hey you should sell this product you should sell this product you should you should feature this you should feature that like ah that’d be endless i already have 600 that right i might know of the okay so help desk starting at the bottom good advice not only that you learn to deal with end users Has the end user changed over time or is the end user still the end user?
Speaker 0 | 27:51.503
End user is still the end user.
Speaker 1 | 27:52.903
It could be any number. They’re people. They’re all different. They’re all different.
Speaker 0 | 27:56.364
Right. One thing I did learn, which has really helped me a lot too, is a lot of times when you’re trying to troubleshoot stuff over the phone, you have to learn what questions to really ask and don’t assume anything. Because you just, you can’t assume that one. The other person, the person on the other end knows what, what they’re doing. Cause obviously they don’t cause they called you to fix it. And two, you say, okay, specifically tell me what this looks like or what does this say? Or what did you click specifically? What did you type in to make that happen? I kind of learned to ask those questions and alleviate a little bit of headache, but sometimes you just can’t. Some people just you’re, you’re better off saying, I’ll tell you what, can you go find somebody that is a little bit more tech savvy to help us out here?
Speaker 1 | 28:44.225
Yes. the, well, when my father calls me and my internet’s not working, help me out. Okay. Go to the box, trace the power cord to the wall. It’s unplugged. Plug it in. That’s 50% of the time, but that’s annoying when we have to call. I don’t know. Do you have good, um, high level support with your ISPs?
Speaker 0 | 29:12.346
Uh, honestly, I don’t, I don’t deal with our ISPs, so I don’t really know. Okay. Now our ISPs in our corporate office. Yes, we do. Of course, those are, you know, DIA circuits, but as far as the circuits in the restaurant, I don’t ever call the carrier. So I couldn’t tell you.
Speaker 1 | 29:27.474
Is that like a, I’m just curious of hierarchy level. Is that something that restaurant people call or what? Like what they call it? Would they actually call in your tier one level support for like, Hey, our internet’s down?
Speaker 0 | 29:38.660
Yes. Okay. Normally the way, the way it’s supposed to work is.
Speaker 1 | 29:41.982
you know our our msp is calling the restaurant first before the restaurant notices like they should notice it should be a proactive alert you know all that type of stuff right exactly hey check the router this that okay we’re opening up a ticket with you know whoever comcast time warner okay
Speaker 0 | 29:57.592
I mean, the way it works is our restaurant calls, we have a CK restaurants help desk. So our restaurants have one number to call for all issues. And then they call our help desk. And if our help desk can’t fix it, then they’ll swivel seeded over to, you know, company A, B or C, whoever they need to.
Speaker 1 | 30:14.366
What can restaurants do to use technology as a business force multiplier and make more money?
Speaker 0 | 30:28.240
Um, well, two things, digital and data are King right now. So what I mean by that is, um, when COVID hit, we all found out how important it is to be on the delivery platforms, uh, to be quite honest, DK restaurants has had the best two years. The past two years have been the best two years we’ve had in, in, in a couple of decades.
Speaker 1 | 30:47.753
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 30:50.575
So you’ve got to have your digital platforms down, whether it be you’re on, you know, the major delivery platforms, you’ve got to have an app. Everybody expects you to have an app. You’ve got to have online ordering.
Speaker 1 | 31:05.464
Not only that, that app better be easy to order.
Speaker 0 | 31:09.726
Yep, yep, yep.
Speaker 1 | 31:11.327
It better be easy to order on that app because it annoys me. If I’m trying to order a bunch of hamburgers for my kids on McDonald’s app and it’s down the street and it doesn’t geolocate and I end up ordering at another restaurant or any other number of things. And I’m in technology. So if it’s hard for me.
Speaker 0 | 31:29.789
I can imagine people that aren’t technology savvy. You know? Yeah. So your user experience has to be good because you’re not going to get too many chances to get that right. And we actually just launched, did a soft launch on our Hardys and Carl’s Jr. app several months ago. We haven’t publicized it yet. So it’s just organically people finding it and downloading it. I like that.
Speaker 1 | 31:50.801
Soft launch. Don’t you love these terms? Corporate terms we use, soft launch. It’s good.
Speaker 0 | 31:55.383
It’s it’s. It’s our beta test before we do a national marketing push on it. And then on the data side, you’re, you know, getting your customer data, having those platforms in place so you can realize, you know, you can make decisions based on good data as to instead of saying, well, I think that we need to sell this or I think we need to sell that. And then on the other end of that, you need to have good back of house systems because two biggest. uh, cost centers in a restaurant or people in food. Um, if you don’t schedule your people, right, then you’ve got people just sitting around or you don’t have enough people and labor shortages now are terrible. So we don’t have people just sitting around because we don’t have enough people in restaurants. And then, you know, you, you’ve got general managers making decisions on gut feelings saying, well, I think I need, you know, five cases of hamburgers and two cases of tomatoes. They said, no, no, wait a minute. According to our sales data here. You only used a half a case of tomatoes last week, so that case and a half went bad. So, you know, the data allows us to make better decisions in restaurant, and then it allows us to make better decisions when marketing to our customers, because now we can say, you know, it’s no secret, right? When you order within the app, we keep that data, right? So we, you know, instead of, if I know you go in every Monday and buy a bacon Western cheeseburger, No sense in me trying to market a chicken sandwich to you, right? I know you like a hamburger. Someone market a hamburger to you. Whereas if you don’t have that data, you know, you’re kind of flying. You’re kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Maybe something will, maybe something won’t. Again, if you’ve got that data, you can make better.
Speaker 1 | 33:32.622
I hate when the app doesn’t work. I order a ton of Buffalo Wild Wings. I order a ton of Buffalo. I always order the same thing every time. It’s like 50 wings or 100. It’s 50 or 100. That’s it. Too many. I’ve got a bunch of kids at home. All eating wings. Um, yeah, the data in the restaurant is huge. It’s unbelievable how important the data is from a food cost standpoint, from managing labor down to 15 minute gaps to, you know, there’s just so many, it’s one of the reasons why I got out of restaurant management a long time ago. It is very, very difficult. You’re not in restaurant management, you’re in it. So good for you. But being the manager is so difficult in a restaurant when you have a huge staff and you’re food cost and paper cost and if i screwed this up and i didn’t get a lot if i screwed up and i missed a case of like large coffee cups it’s just like a disaster and that’s just one of a thousand things going on and people quitting and not screwing up the schedule it’s a very very it’s a it’s near and dear to my heart for any of those people that are doing it and doing it very very well you know it’s it’s very very difficult the you I do love when I drive into a Wendy’s parking lot and my McDonald’s app goes off. Feeds me an ad. Can you tell me about that? You don’t have anything sneaky like that going on? Yeah. It’s like I go into, I drive into the Wendy’s parking lot. It’s like, da-da-da-da-da. And I hear on my phone, I’m like, what is going on here? This is, they all have your information, everybody.
Speaker 0 | 35:05.350
Purely coincidence. I promise you, purely coincidence.
Speaker 1 | 35:09.192
Everyone has your data, people. If you logged in, if you’re logged into Facebook at the same time and you’ve connected your Wendy’s app and your… Burger King app and all of that. And it’s all connected. Somehow you’re done. They’ve pixeled you. It’s like, well, what about my data? I’m going to cancel Facebook. That’s too late. You’re part of this. It’s too late. It’s too late for everyone. I don’t give out my social security number.
Speaker 0 | 35:34.287
Here’s a tip just because you delete your account. It doesn’t mean the data’s gone. Once it’s, once it’s out there on the internet, it’s there forever. You can’t get rid of it.
Speaker 1 | 35:41.331
Yeah. It’s true. Unless there’s some kind of massive, like, really massive screw-up somehow. And it’s so redundant. Have you seen the Facebook data centers?
Speaker 0 | 35:55.917
I’ve heard about them. I’ve seen areas.
Speaker 1 | 35:58.419
It’s insane.
Speaker 0 | 35:59.419
How massive they are.
Speaker 1 | 36:00.540
Just insane. I had one guy on the show before that was in charge of, like, cabling the data centers back in, like, 2013. And that was years ago. And it was unbelievable back then. it’s it’s i don’t think when people look at the app they they see a little thing on their phone that’s what they see they see a gui some kind of interface like that’s you know okay this is how it works um and it’s quite amazing what goes into that from
Speaker 0 | 36:28.142
it is all the way back from cd-rom days it is we actually have a a facebook data center being built in the north side of nashville where which is where i’m located When they’re going to break ground,
Speaker 1 | 36:43.757
they probably already have, but we’ve got one in the area. So what is the, so again, back to the, you got to have your digital and your data now, but what for small business owner, small restaurant owner, something like that, they got to have an app. Can they build their own app? Is that pretty easy for them to do? What should they do? Not really. Just put it on Yelp? Just go to Yelp and be done with it? Grubhub?
Speaker 0 | 37:07.203
I’m sure there are. I’m sure there are white label services out there where you can just say, you know, I’m going to slap my logo on this app and be done with it. I didn’t really get into the digital piece of it. Again, I’m more of an infrastructure type guy. Yeah. But I’m, you know, I’m always trying to get out of my comfort zone. So I was trying to learn as much as I could. So I’m sure there are white label apps out there where you can.
Speaker 1 | 37:30.893
Yeah, or just at least put it on Grubhub, you know, the various different ones. There’s got to be some because there was a lot of things that sunk. A lot of businesses got sunk. during uh covid and the ones that were prepared like you said killed it it did like so so i order so i order if i’m going to order from i don’t know carl’s junior or something i can get it delivered is it being delivered via grubhub how are you guys doing that delivery just
Speaker 0 | 37:54.164
curious yep we’re on all the major platforms um for delivery and then um it just it depends on how you initiate that order if you go to you know doordash.com then we have direct integration you I think DoorDash is integrated now. Let’s just say Uber, right? You go to UberEats.com. We have a direct integration. It will go from Uber, and then we have what I’m going to call the middleware company who handles all that. And then it goes from the middleware company. It’s injected into our POS, and it fires to the POS whenever the driver gets ready. So because, you know, in QSR or quick service restaurants, hot food is key. So you don’t want to make the food and have it sitting there for 20 minutes until the driver gets there. Yeah. So we, we, we try to, we, our systems try to be smart enough to say, okay, the driver’s three minutes away. I’m going to fire that order to the POS system. The people in the restaurant make it. So ideally what happens is, is that as soon as they finished making it is when the driver’s coming in the door, hand it off, they’re gone. So that’s the way that works. And then if you go to, you know, hardys.com or carlosjunior.com or through the app and you order, it goes from there to that same middleware provider. And then what they do is they send it out to whoever the delivery partners are in the area. It may be, again, Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub, what have you. And they say, hey, I’ve got this delivery. What are you going to charge me for? And they bid it out, right? And so the three of them would bid on it, and whoever wins, wins, and they come pick it up and get it. But what I was saying is earlier about the phones in the restaurant is everybody that’s ever ordered food has had a problem. So what do you do in that scenario when you order off our website and you have a problem? You don’t call DoorDash. You don’t call Uber because they’re just really, they say, we just picked it up. You know, that’s not our problem. So you have to call the restaurant and take care of it. It’s quite a maze. Yeah. And giving away secrets here, but we prefer people order from the website, one, because it cuts our fees down. And two, we now get that customer data. So what a lot of people don’t know is that if you have ABC restaurant and people go to DoorDash.com and order the food, DoorDash doesn’t give you the address. They don’t give you the information. They just say, hey, somebody. made an order or picked up an order well now if you get if you go to our website we have your name and your email address now we can send you promotions and stuff like that so that’s what we prefer and it’s it’s usually a little bit cheaper in general for the end user too if you go to not just our website but if you go to any any any restaurants website if you don’t go to doordash you go directly to like um you know buffalo wild wings.com or chipotle chipotle is a big one that i go to sometimes you go to chipotle.com it’s a little bit cheaper on the delivery fee as opposed to going to DoorDash.
Speaker 1 | 40:47.623
Definitely Chipotle app, heavily used. Let’s look at my apps. Let’s just go through. Let’s just, you know, let’s swap apps. I’ve got number one on my app under food, Five Guys. Then Chick-fil-A. Then Jimmy John’s. Chipotle. Sonic. Papagino’s. That’s an East Coast thing. You’ve probably never heard of Papagino’s. Dairy clean. We don’t have Hardee’s here. I wonder where’s the nearest Hardee’s. I’ve got to Google this. I’m doing this just because you’re on the show. We are going to go directly to the Hardee’s website. What would be out? Is there any? Would it be Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s? Or is there anything on the East Coast? What would be on the East Coast? Hardee’s. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 41:35.770
So as a general rule, east of the Mississippi is Hardee’s and west of the Mississippi is. Awesome.
Speaker 1 | 41:40.833
This is going to know this. this would be, I would be fired at your company for not knowing this. They’d be like, you are done. There are nothing in Connecticut, nothing in Connecticut. This can’t be true. You must know, you must know faster. Anywho, Sonic, Papa Gino’s, Dairy Queen, McDonald’s, Olive Garden’s on there. That’s honestly a very, that’s like, I don’t know why that’s on there to be honest with you, but it’s on there. Yelp in general, Buffalo Wild Wings, Firehouse Subs, Raising Canes. absolutely amazing oh so amazing i drive to i’ll drive an hour i’ll drive an hour for that taco bell really okay taco bell grub hub so i should do this more often tell me your food apps on your phone and i’ll see into your soul yeah i don’t have it i don’t have any you have none oh this is how There’s that says something about what are you doing? This says something about what are you doing? You’re eating kale Are you eating kale and working for hardy’s?
Speaker 0 | 42:45.809
Honestly, i’m Too cheap to pay the delivery fees. I just go pick it up.
Speaker 1 | 42:50.732
Okay, but that doesn’t mean you can’t order it on the app I just go.
Speaker 0 | 42:55.935
Yeah, I just hit the drive-thru or honestly, there’s more than three or four people in drive-thru I’m going inside anyway, because I don’t want to wait
Speaker 1 | 43:02.698
I like you. I like you. I do that too. I don’t I don’t wait in those long ridiculous lines I’m, like you’re kidding like just park Walk and look especially Starbucks sometimes out of control the okay, so you see this has a lot I don’t have a single food app on my phone amazing Leadership back to IT leadership. How big a team do you have?
Speaker 0 | 43:26.141
Myself and one other guy I’ve got a one network administrator position open. I think I’ve got another one approved so to job Uh, well one, and maybe another one we’re waiting on final budget approval, but for sure I’ve got one open.
Speaker 1 | 43:42.711
I mean, I can, I can open up the floodgates if you want, you want, where do they have to be? Do they have to be local? Can they work from home? What’s the deal?
Speaker 0 | 43:50.377
Uh, we’re, uh, at a hybrid model. It will require them to come into the office sometimes just because there is hands on stuff that needs to be done. Fortunately. Um, they just need to be in the Nashville area just to be able to, you know, sever down.
Speaker 1 | 44:02.988
Is quite a bit of your job on autopilot. Yeah. How do you, what’s your work-life balance like? How do you, do you sleep well at night?
Speaker 0 | 44:11.709
Well, I have a nine-month-old in the house, so I sleep okay. He doesn’t like to sleep all night all the time, but most of the times he does. But, you know, we’re real big on work-life balance. You know, a lot of people say that, but we actually, you know, practice what we preach because we don’t want people getting burnt out. We don’t want people, you know, not, we don’t want people miserable coming in the office. So, you know, our… Work-life balance is pretty good when we take a couple of days off and recharge and do what we do.
Speaker 1 | 44:42.715
How do you think people make work fun? How can you make work fun in the, I don’t know, how can it be fun? It’s a problem in IT. People have burnout. People like help desk jobs, burnout. There’s whole forums on it. There’s whole Reddit forums on, on burnout. There’s like depression, like forums on it and depression and long, you know what I mean? Right. Congratulations on the baby, by the way, the nine months old, I’ve, I have eight kids. So I’m, I’m past the, I’m past the, I remember the first child, the first child, everything’s new. So, so. Good luck. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. God bless. Everything’s new. Every trip to the hospital is a new thing. Every cough, everything’s new. So it does keep you up.
Speaker 0 | 45:38.386
I’m not sure that’s a conversation for another day, we’ll say. But getting back to making it fun, I think it really honestly does start with culture. I know that’s a big buzzword where people are talking about culture, culture, culture. But I think it’s… And it starts at the top, right? Nobody wants that overbearing boss who’s micromanaging, standing over your shoulder and saying, get this done, get this done, get this done with unrealistic timeframes and somebody that doesn’t understand. You know, our CIO we have now is great. Probably the best CIO I’ve ever worked for. Sorry for the other CIOs I’ve worked for listening here. But, you know, to tell you what type of guy he is, doesn’t mind rolling his sleeves up and helping us out, is that we had an issue here in Nashville a couple. Christmases ago that took out a lot of AT&T circuits. And we had, you know, AT&T primary and AT&T sales service. So we had some restaurants down within the Nashville area and we had to, we had to get Verizon SIM cards out to get these stores back up and running. And we had a list of 12 or 13. He said, okay, I’m going to take these four. You take these, however many you take the, and I’m like, wait a minute. Our CIO is driving to restaurants, swapping me out SIM cards. He’s my kind of guy. Right. Yeah. So it starts at the top. Um, you have to, you have to listen to your people and give them what, what they want as much as you can. Um, you gotta ask, you know, where are you? What do you want to do? We do a lot of, um, stuff with training is a big thing with us that a lot of people appreciate. Uh, we, because if you, if you don’t have the tools to get your job done, then that’s, that’s a problem, right? And, you know, a lot of companies don’t want to invest in their people. We, we try to invest in our people. Uh, we try to, you know. give them the tools they need to get their job done. And if they can’t get their job done, let’s figure out why. A lot of it is, you know, mentoring people or just helping them grow and showing a path forward, giving them fun things to do at the office. Nobody really, well, a lot of people don’t like that mundane, same thing every day, boring, boring, boring, boring. Let’s, you know. Give me some exciting projects you want to work on and let’s, let’s go do it. Right. And just a fun, you try to create a fun atmosphere as much as you can and, you know, let your people do what they want to do. Let them do what they need to do and get out of their way. They need your, if they need help, help them out. If they don’t, let them do their job.
Speaker 1 | 47:59.688
I love it. I’d like to end on the CIO swapping out SIM cards because that’s like a, I think that that almost brought tears to my eyes. It sounds sad. It’s like a meme. It should be like, my CEO drove SIM cards out to swap them out. You see a bunch of IT guys crying.
Speaker 0 | 48:19.546
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 48:20.067
That was outstanding. If you had any, I don’t know, piece of advice for anyone, any IT leaders, people sitting at the help desk wanting to grow up in technology, was there any big learning moment for you?
Speaker 0 | 48:39.240
As far, again, on the help desk, it was more of a, I realized, don’t be shy to ask somebody about something you’re interested in. Because, again, a lot of IT people, including myself, if somebody wants to talk networking, I’ll sit there and jabber about it all day as long as they’ll listen. And what you’ll find is, for the most part, people are happy to, you know, the senior level people are usually happy to, you know, mentor you or teach you whatever you want to know or at least talk to you about it and see if you’re interested. Um, for me, it was more of a, I’m afraid to ask this guy, he’s kind of, or this person, they’re kind of intimidating or the worst they can tell you is I don’t have time to talk to you or what have you, but you know, they’re not going to tell you anything if you don’t go talk to them. So for me, once I learned that, I’m like, Oh, tell me about this. Tell me about that. And you may find you’re interested. They find you. This is boring as all get out. I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to go down this path. So we’ll go ahead.
Speaker 1 | 49:37.464
You can test it out ask a surgeon how to ask my dad once like how do you you know? Is it hard to do a kidney transplant? He’s like, oh, let me draw a picture for you It’s actually pretty easy clamp this clamp this cut that Like oh wow So yeah, people do love talking about hey what? what they chose to, you know, do for a career.
Speaker 0 | 49:58.527
Yeah. And as far as leadership goes, um, you know, it leaders, whether they want to believe it or not, you actually work for the people that you lead. They don’t work for you. You’re there to serve them. You’ve done that mentality, that servant leadership mentality. Things will go a whole lot easier. Help your people out. Cause when it comes time, they’re going to bust their butt for you.
Speaker 1 | 50:19.133
Thank you, sir. Appreciate you being on the show.
