Speaker 0 | 00:10.225
I do have a separation agreement. I haven’t signed it yet.
Speaker 1 | 00:17.769
We are live, just so you know. Everyone out there, we’re kind of live because this will be released at a later date. But today… Okay. No, no, no. I just, you know, before we talk about separation agreements, which is… good. Now we sound real top secret. Everyone out there listening, you’re listening to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today we’re talking with Mike Johnson. And I’m just going to let you say it. First of all, Global Vice President, Network Infrastructure and Security got on the call. And you said, I realized that in order for me to be successful in technology, I realized what?
Speaker 0 | 01:03.086
I had to do it somewhere else.
Speaker 1 | 01:06.808
Great. So awesome. Because think of how many people are stuck or think about how many people want to grow and just don’t have the cojones, so to speak, to do that.
Speaker 0 | 01:22.677
Well, it was kind of an alignment of a lot of different. things. There was no single straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, so to speak. One was, you know, when I started and the way when I came to the realization I needed to leave and I had to have the conversation with the boss, I sat him down and I used an analogy. I said, when you hired me 10 years ago, you needed a house. You know, you hired me to get a handle on IT, standardize everything, bring everything up to, you know, to modern speed. You know, like take the 1990 phone system that you had to transfer a call to. You put it on hold and yelled across the room, hey, pick up line four. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 02:13.652
love it.
Speaker 0 | 02:13.972
Key system.
Speaker 1 | 02:15.693
Key system.
Speaker 0 | 02:16.274
And all that stuff. Yeah. So I said, you know, you hired me to build you a house. So I built you a house and you’ve moved in and now you need someone to shovel your sidewalk and mow your lawn. and I’m not your guy for that. I want to go build another house.
Speaker 1 | 02:32.404
I love it.
Speaker 0 | 02:34.205
And he got it. He got it. But another thing, what led me to that decision was I’d been on a journey lately to explore what it is to be an IT leader. I’m director in name only just because I was the first IT guy at the company. When we grew to the point that they were working me to death and I started experimenting with some SQL because I refused to believe a vendor’s estimate that it took 10 hours to email a CSV file every 15 minutes. But I started doing some development work and they’re like, let’s get you some help. So they got me a desktop guy. Well, then a couple of years later, I end up with a senior developer who’s working remotely and we’re doing all this automation stuff. And and. So it wasn’t like I was a director because I’m an executive. It was, I was a director because I built everything there.
Speaker 1 | 03:36.554
So it’s an interesting problem.
Speaker 0 | 03:38.615
Were they going to bring someone else in from the outside to tell me how to run the stuff I created and I picked out and I implemented and I’ve maintained over 10 years?
Speaker 1 | 03:50.662
It’s an interesting, very interesting. problem or issue that I think more people have. So you did everything. You’re already the leader. You’re so let’s just stamp, let’s just stamp the leadership title on your thing,
Speaker 0 | 04:07.569
but right.
Speaker 1 | 04:09.631
There’s no stock options.
Speaker 0 | 04:13.414
Yes. There’s none of that. Plus we’re in a small family owned company. So there was no thing such thing as an annual review. Uh huh. Um, Well,
Speaker 1 | 04:26.292
that can be a good thing. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 04:28.973
not really, because. Well, also, as the director, I had no budget. I didn’t get a budget. I had to go hat in hand and beg for what I wanted or needed, or I had to beg for forgiveness afterwards. And sometimes you have to just, you know, make a decision on that.
Speaker 1 | 04:55.086
Did you measure results though? Because if you had, if you now have an in-house senior. dev guy, someone at some point must have seen some sort of monetary benefit or return on investment.
Speaker 0 | 05:12.047
Well, so that’s another thing. I had always assumed the way to show value was to be the can do, never say no, always get it done, do whatever it takes kind of attitude. And what I learned was, yeah, that’s good for the business. And while your intentions are to show that you’re a team player and you’re on board, what actually happens is you devalue the work that you do. And therefore, you give them gourmet IK on tap, on demand, and they come to expect that every single time as the norm. So then when you stumble, it’s a completely huge failure. And, you know, Greg Altman, which is one of your former guests, I actually reached out to him because he was like talking about the difference between pressure and stress. And he said, I don’t know if that makes any sense. And I stopped the episode and I wrote to him on LinkedIn. I said, I get exactly what you mean. Like, I don’t need someone to come yell at me about the system being down. Trust me, I know. And I’m already beating myself up more than anyone could possibly do.
Speaker 1 | 06:38.654
Oh, man. You, I might cry. I might cry to know that you’ve listened to an episode, paused it and reached out to somebody. People are listening.
Speaker 0 | 06:52.241
Well, it moved me to the point. And there was another thing he said that really. hit me hard, which was a place can get you believing things about yourself that aren’t true. And if you would have asked me two or three months ago, if I thought what I thought my value was, you would get a much different answer than you would have today.
Speaker 1 | 07:18.196
The gourmet IT on tap on demand. That is beautiful. it’s just beautiful we need to give them what do we need to give them we need to give them Taco Bell 7 layer burrito with 6 layers regularly and then only feed them the filet mignon when they deserve it and pay for it what I’ve learned is and
Speaker 0 | 07:52.742
how I’ve gotten I mean I I dropped out of college. I did everything backwards. I dropped out of college, started an internet service provider back in the mid nineties. Then I went into consulting. Then I met my wife, got a real job on a help desk and worked my way up.
Speaker 1 | 08:08.233
That’s not backwards. I mean, Bill Gates dropped out, right? Bill Gates was in my brother’s class.
Speaker 0 | 08:13.596
But usually you work your way up from the mail room to the executive seat or the help desk to the executive chair. Then you go into consulting and then you might start a company. But yeah, I did it backwards. But no, I forgot what my main point was that.
Speaker 1 | 08:34.960
First of all, I’m ADD and I stayed back in first grade and that’s my problem. So I derailed you and that’s my fault.
Speaker 0 | 08:43.324
I’m ADD as well.
Speaker 1 | 08:46.925
So this is a perfect disaster.
Speaker 0 | 08:55.009
Exactly.
Speaker 1 | 08:55.669
Listen, you said something that’s very powerful and it’s something that could not only change the IT world if people get it, it could change a lot of people. And you said the organization, and it’s not necessarily the organization, it could be the family, it could be the people you surround yourself with. Had me believing stuff about myself that’s just not true.
Speaker 0 | 09:25.118
Right.
Speaker 1 | 09:27.960
How many people are walking around thinking that they’re not worthwhile or they’re not good enough and they’re not tapping into a power and level of strength, the human mind, that is really vastly underserved, underutilized?
Speaker 0 | 09:48.291
Well, and… A lot of times are like, there’s so many problems. There’s the perception of value, like what the executive suite, and what I mean by executive suite is the non-IT executive suite. tend to think that the stuff that is really hard is really easy. And they think the stuff that’s really easy is really hard.
Speaker 1 | 10:12.858
Give me an example.
Speaker 0 | 10:14.599
For example, we were doing a software upgrade and I needed to stand up some new servers for the new version of the software. I knew that’s going to take me all of about 45 minutes to provision those servers and have those ready. And I had the finance director just pumping my legs and, you know, where are the servers at? Where are the servers at? I’m like, what’s the big deal? So finally, I just did it. And I came back to him like 45 minutes later. I’m like, they’re done. And he, you know, looked at me like, that’s it? And I’m like, yeah, that wasn’t hard. But then, you know, something that’s like super, super hard where they think it might be easy is, oh, can you add this? field to this report and it’s a canned report it’s a canned report and so you have to reverse engineer the you know vendors report and then figure out a way okay am i going to recreate that outside or am i going to try and edit their software how’s that going to affect like support am i going to break anything in the agreement and they don’t think about things like that they just want the new field on their report um
Speaker 1 | 11:30.656
Yeah, it does seem simple to them. It’s like adding a whole level of like, can we put this tab inside Salesforce? Can you do that for me? Right. And can we update all of our database? And can we just switch from…
Speaker 0 | 11:47.370
When someone enters something in that system, can it just automatically appear over in the system? Well, it can. And the other thing is not treating IT as a business partner, but more like a vending machine. Where like you come to me with a solution instead of for a solution. Here’s a classic example. I report to the company president and he has an assistant. His assistant sends me a link. Oh, I’m sorry. What was that?
Speaker 1 | 12:34.025
I don’t know. You blipped out for a second. Technology. So assistant sends you a link. No, no, no.
Speaker 0 | 12:39.469
Okay. Sends me a link and it’s to a PA system and six ceiling speakers. And she said, I ordered it and she goes, okay, now I want you to send me a plan for where you’re going to put these speakers. Okay. So I went around the building. I took some pictures. I took a blueprint of the building and I mocked it up and said, here’s Rolf with the speakers. And then she said, good. And then I said, what music would you like to play on these? And she replies, oh, this isn’t for music. This is for sound masking. Wait, what? Okay.
Speaker 1 | 13:28.611
Like white noise? Like white noise?
Speaker 0 | 13:31.232
Yeah. Yeah. Like then she says, well, we have these spaces and we feel that people aren’t using them because they think that people can hear them. So we’d like something to break up the noise so that they can’t hear it. I’m like, okay, well, that’s okay. A, our building is huge. I did the math. We need something like 28 speakers just for one room. I mean, and then you have, you know. Sound masking isn’t just playing some music and slapping some speakers up. You have to make sure you have A channel and B channel in your interference match.
Speaker 1 | 14:09.676
How did that get approved? How did that get approved? I’m just curious, that one.
Speaker 0 | 14:14.199
How did that get approved?
Speaker 1 | 14:15.179
There might be like a way. It’s kind of like a shadow. It’s kind of a shadow IT type of decision thing, you know, where someone made a decision and gave it to you.
Speaker 0 | 14:23.165
It’s the company president. Ah. Have Mike order this.
Speaker 1 | 14:32.282
We got a new CRM. Can we get that in, please? Like next week?
Speaker 0 | 14:36.465
Well, another one was we bought a new ERP. I don’t know how I should talk. I don’t want to give away the industry. So I’ll just say ERP. And they were like, oh, Mike, we just decided to go with this ERP. We need, here’s the hardware requirements. Can you have these servers up? in four days.
Speaker 1 | 15:00.813
So where’s the disconnect? Where’s the disconnect between you building the entire company up from 10 years and not like, where are you at fault? Let’s just be honest. Let’s do some soul searching. Where are you at fault? Because you built the entire thing from 10 years and we need to be able to look inwardly and say, where did I go wrong from a leadership standpoint? Or where was I not setting the right expectations where they’re making these decisions without me? And sometimes it’s just… broken. Sometimes you just need to move because there is no value in IT and it’s broken. Other times you can create it or make sure that you kind of shoehorn your way in there.
Speaker 0 | 15:45.561
I think a lot of it has to do with personalities. In my meeting where I was, after I had thrown my little two-day strike where I was I had come to the realization that the only way I could show the value of IT was to withhold it.
Speaker 1 | 16:04.179
Yes, just turn things off.
Speaker 0 | 16:06.981
So IT shrugged. And it took all of about a day to get the attention. And when I did sit down at the table, I said, You know, I don’t know if I have some crazy romantic notion about how it’s supposed to go down in a family-owned company, but I worked for you for 10 years. We’ve never once gone out for a drink. I’ve never been to your house for dinner. And he’s like, well, I just don’t do that. Okay, well, fine. You know,
Speaker 1 | 16:42.571
but it’s like,
Speaker 0 | 16:46.093
you know, where I think the disconnect was, was we never talked. I had checked and before that meeting, the last communication I had had with him was like two days short of a month prior.
Speaker 1 | 17:02.131
Yeah, that’s…
Speaker 0 | 17:02.651
It was a Teams message I got from him when I had updated one piece of software. They had pulled a patch so the version level on the client didn’t match the server level. And therefore, I told him not to worry about it. It wasn’t a big deal, but I spent half a day. proving that I was right.
Speaker 1 | 17:24.269
Well, at least you’re using Teams.
Speaker 0 | 17:26.790
Yeah, yeah. And that actually was one that I took it upon myself to say, hey, I think this is a valuable tool. I’m going to push it out to everybody. And I got a message, Mike, what are you doing? Stop that immediately. And then work from home hit. And Mike, we need to get Teams out to everybody.
Speaker 1 | 17:49.341
This is so key though. This is it. This is the pivotal issue for so many people. The disconnect between the communication and both sides need to take, well, IT needs to take responsibility as leaders ourselves. If we want to grow as IT leaders, which is not me anyways, I’m just a dude with a long beard sitting in an office talking with IT guys. But if we want to do that, I think we need to take responsibility for our own level of communication because if we don’t, no one’s going to.
Speaker 0 | 18:17.324
We do. And I tried. And I even have a recording of a one-on-one. We were doing weekly one-on-ones. And I started with my standard spiel where I was going to update them on all the different departments and what I was doing for them. And I stopped and I said, and I won’t use his name, but I said, hey, I get the feeling I’m not meeting your expectations. I want to meet them. In fact, I want to exceed them, but I have no idea what they are. Well, Mike, I don’t think we’ve ever done it. I’ve ever done a good job of setting those for you. OK, and then, OK, acknowledgement, but nothing beyond that. I had actually I had actually talked to another peer in the industry at a conference and said, hey, you know. This is kind of what I’m struggling with. I’m trying to get buy-in, a seat at the table so that I’m not an afterthought. I’m actually, you know, a part of these decisions. He goes, well, you know, why don’t you learn the business? And so I proposed to my boss, hey, why don’t I do some job shadowing with all the departments? We have this upgrade coming up. It would be a perfect opportunity to connect with them, see what features might work for them. I could learn what their problems are. He got all excited about it. I was getting feedback, engagement. Around that time, I had a tech recruiter reach out, offer me a position, 25% more. I could work remotely, sounded great, but I got renewed engagement from my boss. I was happy about it. I wanted to see where it went. So I passed on it. And then three weeks later, all the engagement stopped and I got nothing again.
Speaker 1 | 20:05.466
Hmm. Why the engagement stop?
Speaker 0 | 20:10.409
I’m just, I don’t know. I did not get an answer. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 20:15.373
Did you see holes? Did you see what you see in layers? Were there layers or areas where it could add value during that time?
Speaker 0 | 20:23.519
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 | 20:26.601
For example, okay. And did we,
Speaker 0 | 20:30.644
I didn’t know, like, uh, just like, analyzing communication paths. I had no idea that this one, that we have two businesses, actually, like two separate entities, but they’re all sort of about the same network and systems. But I had no idea how much communication happened between two of those business units and between those two companies. And I could open up, I mean, that opened up a whole new array of questions I asked, would this help? Would this help? Yes, yes, yes. I have tons of buy-in from the business unit. But- I can’t get any engagement from management. And so while I was on this kind of soul-searching thing while I’m doing this leadership class, I realized that I had all these, I went through the class thinking, I’m not an IT leader. I just don’t have what it takes. And then I’m reading this book, which I can mention the title of later, but I read through it. I’m like, I have everything except I have no communication with my leadership.
Speaker 1 | 21:32.378
It sounds like you have all of it.
Speaker 0 | 21:36.479
I mean, everything that I’ve done, I’ve done without that engagement. And I got to thinking, just imagine what I could accomplish if I had that engagement with management.
Speaker 1 | 21:49.442
It sounds like a perception of value and an ability to communicate.
Speaker 0 | 21:55.864
Well, and that goes into the perception of value when you make things look, and I’m sorry if this sounds like bragging, but when you make it look. easy you know like again like one kid gourmet it well one thing we do a lot of this is electronic document interchange edi i call it the non-standard standard uh edi is a four-letter word it it’s terrible um but i found we do a lot of it and i was in between our vendor and the trading partner and then we brought in a third party so i could get less involved and I was even more involved because then I was the go-between between the third party, the vendor and the training partner. So out of frustration, I said, you know what, I’m just going to learn it and bring it in-house. And so I did. And then we went from about 40% of all of our stuff coming through EDI to over 97% of all of our business comes through that way. And so that’s value right there, especially when the vendor charges a lot for those setups. Uh, but all I did was I handed them another stick to beat me with because then it was, why isn’t this working? Why isn’t that working? Hey, we have these three new setups. Can you just do those on top of everything else that we’re not going to ask you that you have going on?
Speaker 1 | 23:18.094
Hmm.
Speaker 0 | 23:19.495
You know, I still got to update windows servers. I’ve still got to make sure the phone system works. I still got to, you know, make sure I’ve got enough. bandwidth at our satellite offices. I’ve got other things to do.
Speaker 1 | 23:31.285
All that stuff you could have just outsourced to me. If you had known me back then, I would have done all that for you for free.
Speaker 0 | 23:38.931
Part of the realization of value was kind of funny because when we had the initial meeting, one of the demands I made in my two-day walkout was you need to start calling vendors and set up a meeting to outsource my role. And during the first meeting with the vendor, I could see the finance director turning green and I could see my boss squirming in his chair. And the vendor finally gets to like, we’re an hour in and he goes, whoa, I’m going to have to stop you there. This is a lot to unpack right here. And we hadn’t even, we’d only covered like Windows servers and the hyper-converged virtualization stack. We hadn’t even talked about the network or. any of the development work and integration stuff I’ve done.
Speaker 1 | 24:26.201
It sounds like you need to start an MSP.
Speaker 0 | 24:30.123
You know,
Speaker 1 | 24:30.703
that’s, that’s a nightmare. It is. It is. Maybe just work for an MSP. Let’s go work for an MSP.
Speaker 0 | 24:40.629
That’s kind of one. I’m right now. I don’t know. So, and what’s weird when you have no communication with your leadership, you don’t know where you stand. And. One thing I got to a point, one of the other straws was, I would come in every day and I had this anxiety because I didn’t know, is today the day they’re going to come walk in and say, Mike, pack your stuff and go.
Speaker 1 | 25:04.754
Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that how weird how you can do a two day?
Speaker 0 | 25:09.676
That’s not the weirdest thing. This is the weirdest thing. The first time I felt any kind of job security is when I told my boss, I want to leave. And I think it’s more complicated than me sneaking around behind your back, finding something and handing me my two week notice. And when he said, yeah, I don’t want that. That was the first time in like four years, I felt any kind of job security.
Speaker 1 | 25:31.810
I’ve felt that before.
Speaker 0 | 25:33.131
When I said, I want to leave with no plan. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 25:36.133
yeah. I’ve felt that before where you’re literally doing everything. You see the numbers. You can see the line items. And the only communication you ever get is, I don’t know if I’d call it negative, but like. negative feedback or like how can we do better in this area how can we do better in that area and once in a great while when you perform some massive feat of like in of massive feat of excellence you get a here’s a 50 gift certificate to the outback you
Speaker 0 | 26:12.996
know well what about the invisible wins so this is what i like to talk about is the invisible wins and uh i actually when the first time i brought this up uh in a one-on-one i had a complete look of shock um you completely off guard. I said, did you realize that our main phone vendor was down for three days? What? I’m like, nobody complained, did they? Well, no, I didn’t hear about that. I’m like, that’s right. Cause my backup business continuity plan worked. That’s a win for IT.
Speaker 1 | 26:47.827
By the way, who was down for three days?
Speaker 0 | 26:52.209
It was, uh, I can’t give it away without.
Speaker 1 | 26:56.298
Must have been a PRI or something.
Speaker 0 | 26:58.699
Very, very small.
Speaker 1 | 27:02.600
Hosted provider?
Speaker 0 | 27:03.281
Very small. Regional. No, a regional phone, dial tone provider. An ILAC. Okay. No, an ILAC. SEALAC.
Speaker 1 | 27:11.704
Okay.
Speaker 0 | 27:12.364
A competitive local exchange carrier.
Speaker 1 | 27:14.645
How long ago was it?
Speaker 0 | 27:17.206
That was probably two years ago. Oh,
Speaker 1 | 27:20.648
okay. So they had like a massive route.
Speaker 0 | 27:23.729
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 27:24.850
Edge router insanity or something.
Speaker 0 | 27:27.992
It may have been that. It may have been some kind of a weird hiccup on our end because we were new to SIP trunking. And I don’t know exactly what the fix was. But yeah, there was lots of rebooting involved and lots of calls with three or two different vendors. My phone vendor and the phone provider.
Speaker 1 | 27:52.028
Yeah, telecom doesn’t need to be that complicated anymore. Whenever someone starts talking about putting in a Cisco call manager, unless you’re like 20,000 users or more, I’m like, what are you doing?
Speaker 0 | 28:01.352
I always used to say that, you know, phones was a facilities thing until some dumb ass had to go put it on the internet and make it IT’s job.
Speaker 1 | 28:12.475
Too late. It’s never, never going to see the PBXs or syncopes.
Speaker 0 | 28:16.756
You know, you know that we are the corporate librarians. If you don’t know, you ask IT.
Speaker 1 | 28:23.430
I’ve had people say, I’ve had people put in a ticket for fixing the hand dryer in the men’s room.
Speaker 0 | 28:31.052
At a previous company, I got in trouble for going around and looking at all the breaker boxes.
Speaker 1 | 28:37.053
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 28:37.854
And he said that was a maintenance or facilities job. And I said, but they came to IT and said their computers were down. So if you don’t know, you ask IT. I asked in a leadership team meeting, when Randy shows up at five o’clock in the morning and the building is not here because a tornado hit it, who does he call? And they pointed to me. Why did you call me? Well, we got to get back in the system.
Speaker 1 | 29:08.932
I imagine you like the awakening in office space where he’s like, every day gets worse. So like every day is. the worst day of my life. And then he has an awakening, you know, he has an awakening and he’s like, wait a second. I am like, I am good. Like I am valuable and everything that I do is amazing. And I feel like, like that’s what I’m speaking with. So what are you going to do?
Speaker 0 | 29:39.992
Well, that’s, that’s another thing is so that my, my HR director kind of started this, this whole exact scenario of what went down was exactly what she was trying to prevent. I have my assistant who’s been with me for six years who I can’t get him a raise and he wants one, needs one, deserves one. But I can’t seem to get it to him because I got HR in the other ear saying, how do we increase his value?
Speaker 1 | 30:05.074
Here’s just a question. I just want to lead you through this. Have you seen the P&L for the company?
Speaker 0 | 30:14.161
I have not seen the numbers, but I have been told that it is good.
Speaker 1 | 30:19.306
Okay, that doesn’t matter. On the line item, the IT line item on the P&L, what percentage does IT take up of the, I don’t know, say operating costs?
Speaker 0 | 30:34.858
You know, I should know that.
Speaker 1 | 30:36.979
So my question is, and the reason why I say that is because telecom.
Speaker 0 | 30:40.502
I know it’s not near 3%. I can tell you that.
Speaker 1 | 30:44.105
I can tell you that telecom’s under a percent always. Telecom is always under 1%. But now let me ask you this. How much of the business thrives or would sink and come to a grinding halt if that line item just disappeared? Or shut down?
Speaker 0 | 31:05.891
There’s only one department in every company that can stop everything. And it’s IT.
Speaker 1 | 31:13.796
Don’t understand. I do not understand the logic. That has to be the argument. Right? I don’t know if you heard that show that I did with Milos Topic. But his argument was like, tell me one company. I think it was him. I believe it was him. Maybe it wasn’t. It might be someone else. Anyways, on one of the shows, I got to look up the quote. Basically said, you tell me one department that does better without IT.
Speaker 0 | 31:43.841
Well, and the other thing is we get to meet every single person in a company because we don’t stay in a silo. And, you know, in IT, you, you, I’ve been in IT long enough that you see things you’re not supposed to see and you can’t unsee them. you hear things you’re not supposed to hear and you can’t unhear them it’s true and a lot of times you get treated like office furniture or the janitor and people just talk to each other around you without even acknowledging that you’re there or or uh talking like you were there so you hear things and so you have a unique window into an organization that you’d think more leaders more business leaders would want to leverage um
Speaker 1 | 32:30.862
So how much more could you do with just 1% of that P&L? In other words, if we took 1%, if we raised our IT line item on the P&L by 1%, how much could we affect the bottom line? So let’s say it’s 3%. You said it’s not even 3%. Let’s say we gave you 4%. How much could you make that extra percent flow through down to the bottom line? Do you believe you could add, make up for that? one percent easily without question so we just need to so it’s always a numbers game for the for in my opinion for the cfo and the cto and co it’s always a numbers game it’s always about what can you prove show me the numbers show me the money you know all that type of stuff like well like well so
Speaker 0 | 33:19.673
when we were talking to the first vendor about outsourcing my role you know the other tech and i were starting to talk and we’re you know we’re talking tech we’re sniffing each other out we’re kind of like dogs sniffing each other’s butts to figure out you know like okay what shop are you what’s your knowledge level blah blah and he stops as he goes hey hey this is verbal diarrhea and i actually followed up with it i’m like hey you know when you said that i guess you feel how i feel when you guys start talking margin and roi okay because i just blank out that’s a problem that is a problem but you know and that you Maybe that’s a failure on my part that I don’t take more interest in those things, but maybe it’s a failure also on their part for not including or making that a priority in my world to know those things. Because a lot of those things are, I don’t know if it’s intentional, but they are not visible to me. Not that they’re not visible to me. I mean, I’m rude. I can do whatever I want, but I don’t because I have some ethics.
Speaker 1 | 34:27.174
I’m going to, I’m finding this episode by the way, cause I got to make sure I get it wrong. Cause it wasn’t Milos topic. But I am going to find, I am going to find this out. But with that being said, it’s not like it’s, it’s not that complicated I think to measure the numbers and to measure the return on investment, because when you have, and that, and that could be, that might, this is the bridge. I believe between it and getting a seat at the executive round table in the leadership piece, because it has to learn that language of business in order to translate. And because, because the, the up, the higher up guys, they’re never going to learn. They’re never going to learn the it language. They’re not going to learn that. And they’re not going to learn, you know, I mean,
Speaker 0 | 35:19.900
I don’t expect them to, and that’s why I talk in a lot of analogies. When we lost a node on our cluster, I said, hey, we’re in a plane. We have four engines. We lost one. We’re not going to crash. We’ll get there, but we can’t lose a second plane. We can’t lose a second engine because if we lose a second one, we’re going down. We might have to chuck some weight overboard to stay up, turn some VMs off. So I use a lot of analogies like that. But they also need to, like, well, for instance, we had a… facility where there was multiple buildings there was no conduit between those buildings and i had a wireless link i’m driving into work one day and i drive past the place and i noticed that they repaved the entire lot well it would have been nice but no i could have had them put a conduit in you know we built a new uh training center uh they you know uh My boss comes down and goes, hey, they just poured the floor for the new training facility. And I said, do you remember to put in that outlet for the podium, correct? Oh, no.
Speaker 1 | 36:28.735
Oh, lordy, lordy. I know. It’s stuff like that. It’s really.
Speaker 0 | 36:33.478
There were so many times where I’m like, if you would have just let me just give, you know, I’m a problem solver at heart. It doesn’t matter what the problem is. But I get accused a lot of doing tech for the sake of tech.
Speaker 1 | 36:45.584
But you could be a problem solver. Problem preventer.
Speaker 0 | 36:49.666
That’s kind of-You know what? Right before COVID hit, I don’t know what came over me, but I stopped by my local hardware recycler and they had a box of webcams sitting there. And I said, how much for these? He goes, I’ll give you the whole box for 40 bucks. So I took them. I gave every single person in an office a webcam. And the next day I came back and half of them were on my desk. And then when COVID hit, Mike, where’s those webcams? Do you have any more webcams?
Speaker 1 | 37:18.270
Mm. Mm. Yeah. No kidding. And then we’ve got people that are driving around to every Best Buy. How many laptops do you have? Give me them all. Give me every version. Give me this. You know, one of the other episodes with Anthony Wheat, he said, this is how he put it. He said, why would a CEO not want the person with full visibility across the entire business, all departments and all groups of people?
Speaker 0 | 37:47.918
sitting next to him at the executive round table i have no idea you know i said we are the best the the book i was reading it said we’re the it is the best position in any company to understand the business we don’t understand it we’re just the best position to because we interact with every portion of it you know like I don’t necessarily understand what some of the business terms are, but I know how they flow through the system and I know what can happen when they’re not there.
Speaker 1 | 38:17.934
An assistant, just go get an assistant manager job at Burger King and you’ll know it in six months. That was the best training I ever got was working for Starbucks for, I don’t know, three or four years. It was, it was also the moment where I felt like I could only ever be told, like, even though you’re producing like small miracles on a daily basis and you see that. millions you’re right that are rolling in and then you’re like what about my 39 000 a year you know you know whatever and i’m working like a slave and uh you know uh that the the understanding of gross margin controllable costs operating costs labor flow through profit that was priceless when it, you know, so thank you, Howard Schultz. Thank you for that. You know, that was priceless, but you know, what’s interesting is, and I wrote an article years ago about SD-WAN pieces. I went into Starbucks one day, like, sorry, your drinks were free today. I was like, why? They’re like, aren’t internet’s down. What? What do you mean? Like, you can’t take, like, I even know like the gap if that’s, if they’re still in business anymore. Like last I checked, they had like a tertiary. internet, SD-WAN failover scenario through like a VMware, VeloCloud type of thing where you’ve got, you know, three connections so you can always take a credit card. How many people in that? And it was like a weird network outage too that probably affected thousands of stores. within like, you know, the new England area or Northeast or something, how many free coffees did they give away? How much labor did they pay out? How much product did they give away? How many lost payments? How many like, and then not only that, they also gave me a free, yeah, they also gave me a free wall. You can track it cause they have you counting every coffee bean at the end of the night. But, but they were also giving out like, you know, here’s a free coffee and here’s a free one the next time you come in. Anyways.
Speaker 0 | 40:25.958
you know fill bucks well i i did have uh some retail experience i worked at radio shack during the you have questions we have answers here radio shack man love it all i had to do was take one picture i
Speaker 1 | 40:41.527
took i was in bitterford maine a couple weeks ago i took one picture of the radio empty radio shack place when i because i was going to breakfast at this place called all day breakfast there’s still an empty Radio Shack store there with the big original Radio Shack. I took one picture of it and it got like 40,000 views on LinkedIn and like hundreds of comments.
Speaker 0 | 41:02.217
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 41:03.238
But anyways, how was the Radio Shack? You know, of course we miss those days. Of course we do.
Speaker 0 | 41:11.661
I actually have decided I’m going to donate one of my 3D printers to my local library just so I can meet other geeks in the area because That’s where you met geeks was at Radio Shack.
Speaker 1 | 41:26.853
You can go to the, I think you can probably go to the robotics competition, local robotics competition. I was in jujitsu the other day and one of our instructors, black belt instructors was like, hey, I had to go to the robotics competition the other day. He’s like, I was surprised. They have their own chance. He’s like, they have their own chance in their own world too, just like we do. They’re human too.
Speaker 0 | 41:51.354
As IT people, we’re a little awkward.
Speaker 1 | 41:54.615
Yeah, our hobbies are weird, but we’re people. Oh, this has been an absolute pleasure. I don’t know if we solved the world problems with IT getting a seat at the executive roundtable, but I think the perception of value is probably the biggest thing here. Because once you know your value, now you just need to sell that. You need to communicate that value. But you need to know that…
Speaker 0 | 42:17.084
That was one thing that I was kind of like, you know, well… Every time I talk with that vendor, they love me. And then, you know, like that vendor, those people love me. Why doesn’t my own family?
Speaker 1 | 42:29.018
Oh my God. You just really want to be depressed now. Sorry. Okay. It’s like, why does everyone else love me? But my own family, it’s true. It’s true. You can always work for a vendor. You can always get, you know, the sales engineering job is great. It’s like, why do you, back to the office, back to the office space again, you know, why do you work here again? I told you, I work here so that I talk to the people so the engineers don’t have to. You know, that’s, can I always get a son? He’s done. I always say that. Why do we need the sales rep? Why do we need the salesperson if we have the sales engineer? I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Speaker 0 | 43:22.551
Well, somebody has to keep IT away so that management can buy the song and dance that sales sells them. So that IT can be the whipping boy when they can’t deliver on sales’promises.
Speaker 1 | 43:35.780
Yes.
Speaker 0 | 43:36.421
That’s probably a whole other show.
Speaker 1 | 43:41.784
My quotes are as follows. From the top of the page down. I realized I need. Work to myself to death. Automation. Going from work to myself to death to automation. Hat in hand and beg. That is a note on my page.
Speaker 0 | 43:59.530
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 44:01.230
Can do. Team player equals something. Gourmet IT on demand.
Speaker 0 | 44:08.612
And cheapens the value of it.
Speaker 1 | 44:10.473
Yeah. Gourmet IT on demand. Just. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. This is, these are huge learning points, points, believing in self. Oh, made you believe stuff about yourself. That’s not true. That’s, that’s, that’s some, I don’t know what that is. That’s amazing. Perception of value. Oh, hard is easy. Easy is hard. Love it. It’s really, this is really such a, this is really was a good show. Business partner versus vending machine. It’s just great bullet points. Dude, maybe the solution is a two-day strike. We need to do a two-day strike. Everyone listening to the show, we’re going to have a day where we do a two-day strike.
Speaker 0 | 45:02.624
It’s kind of funny when HR says, well, it seems like this situation has deteriorated rapidly. And you say, no, it’s been deteriorated for a long time. I just simply stopped holding it together.
Speaker 1 | 45:14.409
The, um… It’s going to be another holiday stacked up, another pointless, worthless holiday stacked up with everyone else. But what would be better would be the National Two-Day IT Strike Day. Everyone together is going to leave now. So regardless, Mike, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I thank you very much for sharing. And any last words, any final words?
Speaker 0 | 45:42.364
Just really want… to thank you for having me on the show. I’m not quite sure how you found me because I don’t consider myself a popular IT nerd.
Speaker 1 | 45:53.211
Oh, no, this was popular. This was priceless. Believe me.
Speaker 0 | 45:58.975
But I, you know, just thanks again. It was a pleasure talking to you. You know, to all of you disheartened IT workers out there, don’t forget you do amazing, hard work. sophisticated work daily that other people can’t do. And don’t get paid for what you do. You get paid for what you know how to do.
Speaker 1 | 46:24.649
Yeah. So just stop doing it. Go on strike and stop handing people other sticks to beat you with.
Speaker 0 | 46:30.110
Yeah. Well, sometimes the only way you can show your value is to just withhold it.
Speaker 1 | 46:36.892
Yes. Yes. I wonder if I’m glad. I hope my wife doesn’t listen to the show. I’m not changing diapers. I am not feeding people. I’m not. I’m done. Have you ever had your wife? I have eight kids. So if you’ve ever had like your wife disappear for some reason, like, you know, something happened and you have to like fend for yourself for a couple of days, I just become a delegation machine. I’m like, all right, you do the dishes. You do this. You do that. What do you guys want to do? Let’s break all the rules. Let’s go out tonight. Let’s get ice cream. I have two,
Speaker 0 | 47:08.568
but I have two at home. And yeah, but. yeah it doesn’t work that way with them i i had to change diapers luckily we’re well well beyond that now but yes well have a wonderful evening sir afternoon too and uh i look forward to talking soon
