Speaker 0 | 00:09.582
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, Jeff Reed, Vice President of Information Technology at the Buccini Poland Group. Welcome to the show. Let’s just, let’s go back the old school way. We’ll start off with you. Give me a little background and how you got into this perfectly always organized working in efficiency technology job.
Speaker 1 | 00:37.515
Yeah, we’ll pretend to. Well, how far do we want to go back? You want me to go back?
Speaker 0 | 00:47.461
I mean, I like as old as Pong. Sometimes that’s older for other people. Sometimes it’s punch cards. So, I mean, I like going back that far. because there’s, you know, as there’s a turn of the guard, I guess, with people older than younger than millennials, like yourself, you know, there’s people that have actually grown up with internet, which I’m assuming you grew up with no internet.
Speaker 1 | 01:12.821
That’s for sure. I’m back in bulletin board days. I’m 49 now, just turned 49. And I got my first, I see. position when I was 17. My uncle worked at a fur company called DuPont here in Delaware. One of the biggest employers in Delaware. He kind of got me in as a weekend what they called a computer operator. But all it was was a glorified librarian.
Speaker 0 | 01:47.097
Yeah, because what was a computer back then? What was it? I mean, was it running on spinning tapes like what we had in the early 007 movies? Have you ever watched, isn’t it funny how you watch those movies and you look at what was like high tech back then? It’s, um, it’s always like a big room with like spinning wheels of tapes and stuff like that. Was it similar to that?
Speaker 1 | 02:07.726
Yeah. I mean, I, when I look at that stuff, I always say to my kids, I used to work on that kind of machine. They’re like, yeah, right. Dad. But yeah, I mean, I mean, when I worked at DuPont, we did have the reels, but we also had these, uh, cartridges. They were probably about. I don’t know, about four by five. And they had a tape library of 100,000 tapes. And basically the machines, there was about 20 machines. And it just said, hey, feed me tape number, blah, blah, blah. And you just went and got it and you fed it.
Speaker 0 | 02:40.355
And that was your job?
Speaker 1 | 02:42.015
That was my job. And it was a weekend job. I was a kid. I was 17. All I needed was gas money.
Speaker 0 | 02:47.978
That’s pretty sweet, actually. Yeah. What was I doing when I was 17? Nothing good, probably. I’m 45, so I’m not too far off. So I’m not too far off. So I’m 45, so that means when you were 17, I was, what, 13 or something like that? So yeah, it was similar. There’s computers coming out. Did you have a computer at home at the time?
Speaker 1 | 03:09.911
I had a Commodore 64C.
Speaker 0 | 03:12.592
Yeah, it was perfect.
Speaker 1 | 03:13.953
And an Apple II,
Speaker 0 | 03:16.794
I think. Apple IIe. Yeah. Oh, so you had two.
Speaker 1 | 03:19.592
My brother had the Apple. I had the Commodore because my buddies all played games, and the Commodore had all the games. That’s where I got it.
Speaker 0 | 03:29.038
What did your brother end up going into? Because he had the what did your brother did he end up going into technology or something else?
Speaker 1 | 03:35.502
No, and he could have because he I mean, the guy was so smart. He just ended up going down, like, the manufacturing path.
Speaker 0 | 03:43.668
It’s because he had the Apple. It’s because he had the Apple, I guess. That’s right.
Speaker 1 | 03:47.230
That’s why I got one.
Speaker 0 | 03:50.312
And then,
Speaker 1 | 03:50.912
you know, I left there and went to work for a company as a printer operator. And we worked on these big, giant six-foot reels of paper. And I just printed that. We just printed, printed nonstop all day. These machines were probably about 50 feet long. And I just spit out paper nonstop. And we just had to stack them, move them, do whatever.
Speaker 0 | 04:15.119
Did it seem more fun back then, or is it more fun now?
Speaker 1 | 04:19.140
I’m here by now, thankfully. Back then, I put it to get out so I can go hang with my friends. It really didn’t mean anything other than gas money at the time. Maybe it made me a better IT guy in the long run, but I really wasn’t concerned with that.
Speaker 0 | 04:38.145
Just completely IT aside, just curious. Is your… best part, best years of your life? Are they now or were they earlier in your life?
Speaker 1 | 04:51.306
So are we talking career?
Speaker 0 | 04:52.906
I’m just talking in general. Like when I think now, when I think now, I think, and I think back to just what we all have to go through growing up and I’ve got kids and stuff like that. I think now is probably the best time in my life. Career, family, everything. Just me in general. I mean, people go through all kinds of crap. So, I mean, it’s different for anybody. But for me right now, I would say it’s probably right now.
Speaker 1 | 05:16.959
Yeah, I agree. And you know what? I can’t imagine not having my kids. But. I got a 14 year old, 11 year old. So if I said, Oh yeah, I like to go back when I was 30, cause I’m having a lot of fun. I feel pretty bad.
Speaker 0 | 05:30.830
So he guilt tripped you into saying now.
Speaker 1 | 05:34.311
Yeah. I mean, I have a great job with a great company. I have great kids and wife, like everything. Yeah. That was a good time. I’ll be alive.
Speaker 0 | 05:43.975
Excellent. So somehow we have to, so you, so you moved from, you know, Was it always tech jobs then? Then it was printer job or was it, no, I worked at Burger King for a while?
Speaker 1 | 05:56.787
No, tech the whole way through, 32 years of it.
Speaker 0 | 06:00.530
Wow. And at what point did it become, so then did you go to school, go to college or anything like that? And was like, I’m definitely going this route and it was obvious?
Speaker 1 | 06:10.058
It was kind of weird. I went to school to be an industrial engineer. I thought I’d be more interested in doing that. And I got my degree and never. You kind of get another job, get another job. I never went that route. I kind of just went that way. And then I got a technology degree after that.
Speaker 0 | 06:29.144
It seems to be pretty common. It seems to be pretty common. A lot of engineers, a lot of engineers go IT. It’s very common. I would say 30% of the people that I’ve had on this podcast, quite a large number, were going the engineering route and ended up in technology. So there’s something there about that. So at what point did you end up moving into some sort of leadership role? And do you remember any kind of turning point where it was like, no, I’m no longer just, you know, keeping the blinky lights on anymore, unless you’re still doing that. I hope that’s not the only thing you’re doing. But at what point was it, no, now it’s quite large and serious and now I’m in an IT leadership role?
Speaker 1 | 07:18.166
say back i used to work for a global pharmaceutical company that was jobs ago so that is we’re pushing and well probably left there about 12 years ago and i had a manager there who and he was phenomenal so he good men for he kind of he kind of honed in on what you were really good at and he really like try to harvest that. And I saw her. And then when she left, I had another great manager come in and he was great. And I just thought, okay, do I want to, cause I was a nerd. I mean, I love fixing things. I love building things. I worked on a North America regional team. We fixed problems. I loved it. It was my thing.
Speaker 0 | 08:07.155
Just real quick. You said that she harvested your, strength, so to speak. What was that? What did she harvest and how did she do it?
Speaker 1 | 08:20.042
He knew what everybody on the team was good at and he developed you to fill a specific role on that team. And our team was a team of rock stars because we all had different skill sets. And I think he put this team together with that in mind. At the time, probably we didn’t see it. After we were done and we ended up getting bought by another company, we kind of all kind of withered apart. That’s when I was like, wow, you know, we had every base covered in that department. And we pulled them from multiple different sites across the region. And I’m telling you, there wasn’t anything we could solve.
Speaker 0 | 09:05.087
So she cherry picked people. She put together like a special team. Yeah. That is by far when, when people ask me, when I look back at like, you know, how I was, and I’m, I’m just sharing it at the same time. Cause when I ask, you know, I tell people a lot of times when they’re looking for a job or something like make sure you strategically look for the right job, make sure you don’t go to a place where they’re just going to hand you a pile of crap and say, deal with it. Right. You have some sort of flexibility and every company that I worked at where I was. for highly successful, I was able to build a special team. And it might not even been a team. I might not even been in a management role. I might not have even been in a leadership role, but it was still about who are the people that are supporting me. They’re going to help me get to X, Y, Z, and then handpick those people. And I can clearly remember being at a company where we had to, you know, sell like this, you know, complex product. And, you know, you have to take something from, from sale to implementation through. through, well, A, implementation, project management, all the way to training end users, all the way to the end. And if you don’t have a special person at every point of the way, like most companies, things kind of fall off at implementation and people ignore integration and stuff like that. If you don’t have someone every step of the way, you’re going to be miserable.
Speaker 1 | 10:36.067
Yeah, that weak link. That weak link is a really, I mean, I don’t get it.
Speaker 0 | 10:41.451
So what did she say? What were you doing there?
Speaker 1 | 10:44.650
what was your strengths my role was a region north america regional desktop engineering so my my strength was one i was a people person which sometimes in the i.t world that’s
Speaker 0 | 11:00.617
a part that’s really lacking that’s all you need sometimes that’s all you need in the it world right i can google the rest yes
Speaker 1 | 11:10.894
Yes, if you’re smart, you can talk the talk. Maybe you can make it. But my role was when we would roll out new products, new projects, I would make sure that we would build it and implement it throughout the entire country. I would work with all the remote sites, probably about 15 of them, and we’d roll it out. And we would support. We were the tier three to every site in North America. So. I became the technical lead because I could handle the oddball problems that would come up. And then I also did a lot of the larger projects. We had people that were excellent project managers who weren’t as technical. And then we had me, who was really technical, wasn’t as great as a project manager as they were. Because I was a doer. I was more of a hands-on, get dirty kind of person. So we would… we would team up and it would be the perfect scenario. But I was the person everybody came to. If they couldn’t figure something out, I’d figure it out with them. I’m not saying I was smarter, but I just knew how to get around things and knew how everything worked. And I don’t know, that was my skill set. Well,
Speaker 0 | 12:27.166
no, but the point is, is you learned, I’m assuming you had a big takeaway just from your past manager’s ability to harvest people’s strengths. And- Yeah. I’m assuming that had a fairly impactful, it was impactful to you when you moved on later on.
Speaker 1 | 12:45.634
It was. And if you want to know when it almost sucked the life out of me is when I went and worked for the government. That’s a different world.
Speaker 0 | 12:55.161
Yeah. Yeah, it is. But when the Steve.
Speaker 1 | 12:59.203
I was a hard worker too. Hey, slow down.
Speaker 0 | 13:03.466
Yeah, slow down. This, this, we need to draw this out for eight months. Like seriously. This is an RFP. We need to draw this out for eight months and we need to vastly overspend on this bought Q-tips because we need to… You know what?
Speaker 1 | 13:19.616
I can do this. I can do the same thing.
Speaker 0 | 13:25.439
So skipping… Well, I think the government thing is an important piece just because you realized where you don’t want to be. So that sometimes we learn like, no, this is just really… this is not it for me. And then, so how is the team now? How big is your team right now?
Speaker 1 | 13:50.935
So right now, I’ve built it from scratch. So I kind of did what I was taught before. I have three people below me right now. So it’s a team of four. I’ve got application support. I’ve got senior IT specialists, and I’ve got desktop support. But we’re only supporting about 400 people. So, it works really well. We cover everything, which I miss over at the government level. I miss that typical company. We do everything from the phone line coming in through the walls, the ceilings, to the servers, everything. Everything’s owned by us. We manage it really well.
Speaker 0 | 14:39.644
It’s interesting that you said 400 is a small number because I’ve found that the average ratio of… IT professional to end users in a mid-market enterprise company is one to a hundred, which to me is still, so you’re right on, but it’s still absurd to think that that’s plenty of people, plenty of IT power, because it’s still, I mean, and I think of it from the aspect of, you know, teacher and students in the classroom, right? Can you imagine having… Can you imagine one teacher and a hundred students? How can every student really be served? But when you bring in technology, you can do that. And it’s just, I’m only pointing it out to point out what a superpower and basically everyday hero the IT guys are. You have four people supporting 400 people. If you stand back and you actually think about that, that’s a lot of people you’re supporting.
Speaker 1 | 15:41.694
and 15 locations.
Speaker 0 | 15:44.596
You know what I mean? It’s not like, it’s not like what you’re downplaying. And I think, I think you’re downplaying how good of a job you do. So how do you, when it comes to, I guess in that environment, what’s your biggest problem that you deal with on a daily, weekly, whatever monthly basis? It could be anything. It could be literally anything. It could be support from executive management. It could be communication. It could be, I don’t know, balancing all the tickets that we get from this particular thing. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 16:23.957
Well, I think it is. No, my, I have my, the company I work for now is a company of companies. So it’s not like we are, we, we do one thing and we have a specific set of applications and we support them. We, we, have about six or seven, I’m probably downplaying that, different business types that have very specific business needs. And every one of those businesses thinks they’re the most important thing to me. So I need to jump because some part of their business is not functioning up to par. But I have to actually manage that. I have to manage my priorities. And that’s really hard to do because I don’t want to say that our food and beverage division is any less important than our commercial operations business or whatever. So it’s hard to manage client expectation and manage the prioritization of what’s coming in. And it’s really hard with a midsize enterprise company. A lot of the other departments are short staff as well. So everything comes at you like a shotgun. It’s not planned out. It’s not, hey, this is our standard process for doing things. It’s, hey, I need this yesterday. Hey, we just hired a guy who’s starting tomorrow. We need new equipment. It’s always like, I mean, shotgun coming out of that.
Speaker 0 | 17:59.532
It sounds very, it sounds very like. Like a chapter in the Phoenix Project. Have you read that?
Speaker 1 | 18:08.004
No.
Speaker 0 | 18:09.085
You got to read that. Get it on audio. It’s like, because it’s like 24 hours long. If you have not listened to the Phoenix Project yet or read the book, you must. Because there’s literally a chapter in that book that’s very, it’s like you literally want to bang your head on the desk and cry for the guy. Because it’s about, you know. competing priorities and and and like literally like 600 to like 800 like tickets like backlogged from every department all these people you know pulling people in different directions and and like a week a weak link like you know it employee that can he’s the only one that can fix like you know all of these and you know so he gets in he but he’s the one on the main project and gets pulled away from all these different things because everyone else’s thing is more important than everyone else’s I mean, you said it perfectly. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 19:02.752
Yeah. And the other, I think the one thing I hate to do every month is balance my accounting.
Speaker 0 | 19:10.939
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 19:12.220
Reconcile all my spending.
Speaker 0 | 19:14.141
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 19:14.381
For the entire time. That is the one day I cannot stand.
Speaker 0 | 19:19.105
So you almost procrastinate it.
Speaker 1 | 19:21.767
Yeah. I mean, the accounting folks send me the information. I say, okay, I got to set aside a couple hours to do this. And I just, I mean, it’s always the last minute. Here you go. Here it is.
Speaker 0 | 19:34.232
Okay. So this is.
Speaker 1 | 19:34.932
I manage the IT spend for all entities, all locations.
Speaker 0 | 19:38.494
Oh, wow. There’s no like, no system for that? We don’t have an app for that yet?
Speaker 1 | 19:45.217
We did have a purchasing department that made it easier, but it’s kind of. kind of rethought this whole thing. And we, now we do a lot with Amazon now and they do have a good reconciliation that you can run. So I just, it’s one of those things. It’s not technical. It’s not fun. It’s not fun.
Speaker 0 | 20:07.425
You have to divide everything or like divide stuff up into different departments. Is that what it is? And codes for accounting and that type of stuff.
Speaker 1 | 20:14.329
Yeah. Different GL codes, different entity codes, splitting them. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 20:20.192
So how, I mean, it does bring up the budget as a question. Are you in a healthy IT organization where they have no problem spending money on IT? It’s just a pain, you know, reconciling it all? Or is there also that aspect as well, which is like you got to stay within budget at the same time. And how are you asking for more money when you need it?
Speaker 1 | 20:47.083
So I do. I bring up or I create the IT budget for every entity at the end of the year. And if we hit something where there’s like a big spend that I think is the right way to go and we can, there’s some good ROI coming out of it or reducing like the threat risk. I report directly to the president and he and I have a great relationship. I would normally pitch it to her. explaining to her what I think the situation is. I’ll tell her what I think the right choice is. She’s great because she’ll come up with different ideas and maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe I’m not thinking big enough. So then we’ll go to the brothers who own the company and then we kind of pitch it to them. And I mean, yeah, I do get shot down sometimes, but I think the overall picture, we find the money. We do the right thing. I try my best to not spend money as soon as I can. So I do calculate how much savings we can do. If I do something for a site, I calculate, hey, this is saving that site $1,200 a month. And I actually put that in my head and then put it on my board. And I said, okay, maybe if something comes up that I need $10,000 for, it’s a lot. So think about it in that way. You know, it’s… But then you get to the point where the purse won’t open and you got to deal with it.
Speaker 0 | 22:23.957
Sometimes the financial speak can confuse people, but it’s really quite simple at the end of the day. Like, are you saving money? Are you making money? Protecting, I guess, the business at the same time. But I think there’s three points there that, three points. I’m going to say three points very clearly so that my editors, when they edit this episode, they put these three points. Into the show notes. But three points under the financial kind of aspect of IT that’s very important when asking for money and numerous things is number one. Point number one, you have a good relationship with your basically C-level directors. In your case, it’s direct relationship with the CEO, correct? Yep. Okay, so number one, good relationship. with the CEO. So you’re like on the same page. You’re like, yeah, you’re pretty much meeting at the same table if they’re, you know, metaphorically the, the, the executive round table. And number two, um, why did I forget already what number two was? We’re just trying to remember how, how we, um, described this very clearly, which was, oh, maybe it’s a, you know, your money very, very well to begin with. And you’re trying to save money as much as possible and be efficient. So when you go to ask for money for a big project that makes sense, people trust you. Right. That’s kind of a point. I wonder what that, how would we, how would we, help me wordsmith that. What’s, what’s bullet point number two? It’s, it’s, you know, I don’t know. I’m good with money. I don’t know.
Speaker 1 | 24:08.993
Keep, uh, faith in your. And you’re sad.
Speaker 0 | 24:14.705
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 24:15.705
That they’re having, that they have, they know, the owners know, the president knows that I’ve got their best interest.
Speaker 0 | 24:22.850
Great. So there’s trust. Okay, so trust. And trust is two things. Do I trust that the person’s a believably good person that’s not going to screw us over? And number two, are they competent? That’s what trust is. It’s basically point A and point B. I guess A and B, we have to say there. Okay, so, and then point three was. You track it. You report on it. So you know where you’re saving money, where the ROI is coming in. you know where you’ve saved money. So you’ve got to kind of like that bank decide like, hey, we saved this much money over here. Can we move it here? So you’re kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul or whatever that saying is in certain aspects. Yeah. Because there’s a lot of stupid things that people are spending money on in the IT world right now that’s literally just hemorrhaging money that they could be using towards a digital transformation. For example. Yeah. Old MPLS circuits that you have three meg throughput on, people pay, literally. I ran into one not too long ago that was $60,000 a month for fully meshed MPLS network. You know, I mean, it was a lot of sites, but it was $60,000 a month. You know what I mean? It was like for three megs. Like, can you imagine paying $60,000 a month for like a three meg WAN? I mean, you just… please. And it was like a simple, but you know, there’s other things too. There’s numerous like kind of like quick hits that people would come in. And that’s why I love that every now and then an ITI can come in and be like a true hero to a company because he just eliminates all this low hanging fruit and then reinvests it into the stuff that makes sense. Why that’s happening? I don’t know. I think someone gets it. Maybe it’s back to the government metaphor again, you know, slow down. but you know we want to keep our jobs here for a long time and do little
Speaker 1 | 26:27.486
I was going to get mad some government guys were like what are you talking about this is America this is America I will go on the record to say that I had good employees there but you can see it you can see it all around I lived and worked in DC and around the beltway for years
Speaker 0 | 26:45.095
I’ve seen it all and then I’ve seen the heated driveways with the heated tile driveways too from the from uh i don’t know some retired military dude that’s been you know lobby not lobbying uh that does you know government whatever the bid boards and all that stuff and aid aid service to you know all that stuff it’s it’s amazing when you’re there when you see how it all works um some of the some some of the systems could be improved in our in our government they’re a little broken let’s just put it that way i’ll put it lightly um As far as reporting though, like as far as reporting these business numbers and stuff, do you ever have to give like a quarterly report or business report or anything like that? Do you get to, do you get very involved on any type of a P and L statement or understanding how the business works from that aspect?
Speaker 1 | 27:35.887
No, but I do work with the people that do do it. They normally come to me quarterly and ask me about the spend and what we’re doing and where, what does spend look like next year? And So they’ll come to me and I provide them with rough numbers and then they kind of take that and run with it. But me, I don’t really get too far into that. I’ve got too many other things to do to really focus on that part of it.
Speaker 0 | 28:04.049
No, I got you. I just think sometimes it’s, there’s, I’ve had people in the past tell me that it’s helpful to be able to speak the. The CFO speak, the capital expenditure, the flow-through profits, cash efficiencies, EBITDA, these type of things are helpful sometimes when you have to go, if you don’t have a really good relationship with the CEO and you have to go present to the board as to why we’re purchasing this new, I don’t know, $500,000 XYZ widget. The… with that being said, vendor stuff, do you deal with a lot of vendors and what’s your kind of vendor philosophy?
Speaker 1 | 28:54.175
Yeah. I mean, I’m, I am the direct contact to any it vendor that sells us. You know, I’ve over the last five, six years, I’ve kind of weeded out a lot of the vendors that I think are of value to me. And I, I’ve got a list of heavy hitters that I like to use all the time. Yeah. And our relationships are so good. And those are great. Constant communication, projects go their way, the money flows their way. I know I’m getting quality back.
Speaker 0 | 29:29.565
Let’s talk about what makes a good vendor then.
Speaker 1 | 29:32.746
So I’ll tell you what makes a bad vendor.
Speaker 0 | 29:35.507
Great. Even better. Even better.
Speaker 1 | 29:38.708
I’ve got an issue with… and i and i know i you know i i’ve never done it sales before i don’t i’m sure it’s difficult but I have LinkedIn and I think every IT salesperson on the planet has reached out to me 30 times this year because that’s all LinkedIn is. I can’t even log into LinkedIn to actually go view what I really would like to see what other companies are doing. Huh.
Speaker 0 | 30:11.460
Well, I’m glad that you logged in and responded to my director, I guess.
Speaker 1 | 30:19.964
Yeah, because there’s a way to, in my book, there’s a way to communicate.
Speaker 0 | 30:25.846
Yes, like a human.
Speaker 1 | 30:28.207
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 30:29.088
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 30:29.248
Okay, go ahead. When you guys reached out, at first I wasn’t interested. I was like, I’m too busy. And then I think he pinged me one more time. And then I said, well, let me take a peek at what’s going on. And I listened in and I was like, oh, this sounds good. This is. the kind of stuff I could listen to. Oh, thank you. But then I look right below it and there’s 30 people trying to tell me the cybersecurity stuff.
Speaker 0 | 30:57.939
It’s the security.
Speaker 1 | 30:58.619
It’s not like they have a product that they’re trying to convince me to buy. They’re asking me what products I need. Like, what is you… I want to talk… They want to talk to me and they want me to give them their sales pitch. And I just… I can’t deal with it. Vendors who are constantly… uh, trying to sell me. I’d rather have a vendor reach out to see how I’m doing.
Speaker 0 | 31:22.004
It’s true. I hate when I get the, hi, Phil, I’m with blah, blah, blah. And I get, we called, uh, I took a LinkedIn course actually, uh, maybe three or three or four years ago. And the, I’ll give him a, so his name is Tyrone. I think Giuliani or Julie, I, he’s going to kill me now for butchering his last name, but, um, he lives in Japan and he’s like an Australian dude. And he calls the, the LinkedIn thing. He’s like, don’t do the value vomit. He’s like, don’t show up in my inbox and just, you know, send me, that’s not how human beings interact. He’s like, they don’t interact this way. We’re like, Hey, by the way, my name is, when can I get on your calendar? I’d love to jump on your calendar. I’m moving this to the top of your inbox, blah, blah, blah. Here’s what we do. Here’s all this. It’s just human beings don’t interact that way. And you just don’t want to talk with people like that.
Speaker 1 | 32:27.969
Yeah. And you hit it on the head. I probably have three of them in my mailbox.
Speaker 0 | 32:32.912
Yeah, I definitely have a ton. It’s like, what am I going to do? But, um, yeah, so that’s why. Yeah, I love when people say something crazy to me, and then I’m like, okay, finally, like a diamond in the rough.
Speaker 1 | 32:44.882
Yeah, and I have great relationships with Dell, with a lot of Microsoft partners. And I’ve really weeded them out, or weeded the bad ones out and kept the good ones.
Speaker 0 | 32:59.068
So how do you know what you don’t know then, is I guess the question, because that’s the kind of fear thing. And I think that one of the issues that… IT people can do is they can go down the dark hole of research and they could spend eight months trying to vet a certain project. Right. Uh, cause they’re, how do you find the right vendor then? So how are you picking the right vendor? Not on LinkedIn?
Speaker 1 | 33:23.787
Not on LinkedIn. That’s for sure.
Speaker 0 | 33:25.628
Where are you going? Um, I go to, don’t tell anybody. You Google things. Okay. We’re Googling.
Speaker 1 | 33:32.213
No, next, next week I’ll be at a conference. Florida and it’s called the MES conference, Midsize Enterprise Summit. And all of the heavy hitters are there. All the heavy hitters from all aspects of IT are there. And you get to meet them, talk to them, hands on experience with their products. You can have breakout sessions with them, have dinner with them. And that’s how I’ve gotten a lot of these contacts. where I make a connection and I go, okay. And I’m honest with them. I’m brutally honest and I demand that they be brutally honest with me. And if I feel like we should try something out, we will. And if it does not work, I’ll be brutally honest and say, we will not do this again. And I think after 32 years in this, I can kind of read people pretty well. And you might have a great salesperson with a really crappy team behind them. Or you might have a lead salesperson with a great team of assistants. You’ll never know unless you talk to your colleague. And when I go to MES, all of those people that are invited to come there are all the same level as me. Director or hire, they work a lot of, they try to match you up with like people, like companies. And you build a big rapport with all these people and you start talking like, what are you guys doing? Who are you using? And it’s extremely beneficial. And I go to Spice World every year. That’s another way to kind of see what is out there and then go down that route. So you got to stay relevant. You got to stay, you got to keep stepping into those arenas to keep your eyes open. So there is no good, I don’t think there’s a right answer, but that’s how I do it anyway.
Speaker 0 | 35:29.322
Yeah, there’s not, I mean, there’s certainly a lot of good people out there. There’s no, like you said, perfect one size fits all. First of all, every company is different anyways. Your company is different from another company. Your group of end users respond different than a different group of end users. One guy’s got a bunch of truckers in his company. The other one’s got, you know… whatever. It’s amazing sometimes the different groups of end users and how they respond to any type of technology that we put in their hands or I guess in the cloud now. So Ben, very fun talking with you. If there was, what should I have asked you? Is there anything that again, back to kind of like what’s your single, what do you think is the Any IT directors or what do you think is one of the single biggest struggles, problems or frustrations that people are dealing with in the world in IT right now?
Speaker 1 | 36:32.326
Well, I think I think one, the cyber threat landscape right now is horrible. And I think it’s really putting a lot of strain on IT folks with all this remote work, these hybrid working environments. Bring your own device. All of these things just create these massive, massive security holes. And when you’re a small, mid-sized company, you do not have a stock. You don’t have a guy dedicated to network security. You don’t have a guy dedicated to all these VPN. And it’s really tough. I think for the mid-sized, I think that’s the struggle for mid-sized the most. I think that if I was a hacker or a bad guy on the web with these skills that these guys have now, that would be my target. Mid-sized companies between 100 and 500 people that have limited IT folks. I can’t look at logs all day. I don’t have the money to spend on really expensive monitoring tools. That’s the problem today because everyone… especially in this country, everyone is almost demanding this flexible work environment, which is a security nightmare. So, I mean, that’s one of the biggest things. And I think another thing that I think IT management and even like my tech guys, we’ve got to have empathy towards these employees. Ultimately, we think that we’re our own department. our own department, we’re the IT department, their accounting, their sales, their this or that. We’re still a service company. We’re still like a maintenance guy. We’re here to support the other departments. And I think a lot of IT people, especially along my way, kind of thought that they were better than that. That they…
Speaker 0 | 38:45.404
That’s interesting.
Speaker 1 | 38:46.284
Yeah. Why are they asking that?
Speaker 0 | 38:50.963
For example, give me an example.
Speaker 1 | 38:54.205
So why would this department be asking for individual printers when there’s a copier right there? Well, their department head said that they’re going to print confidential information, and they need to have their own printer. And then the IT person thinks to themselves, well, they don’t need that. they don’t that why would they need that well we’re here to to provide a service to a company or to a department we’re going to tell my job is to tell them my opinion but ultimately they’re the one who writes back so we need to i see people sometimes need to take that step back and take me back to that saturday night live skit yeah where they move over call the i.t you know, move,
Speaker 0 | 39:48.212
yeah, move, click here, F1, shift two, three, four. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 39:51.795
exactly. And we need to, we need to, um, accept that and say, we are the mechanics. We need to fix this. We need to do it. I think there’s a, there’s a fine line there, but.
Speaker 0 | 40:05.086
Uh, there’s definitely a bridge and the entire purpose of the show is to bridge that gap between it and, uh, speaking the language of business. Because there is a jump that a lot of IT professionals look to make, and that is they want to go from IT director to CTO or CIO, and they want to move into that C-level realm. Which is, to a degree, interesting that you said they think they’re bigger than they are, because from that standpoint, that would fit right in line with it. But there is a reality there. The reality is that some of the largest companies that are making the most money on the face of this earth are technology companies. So some geek that was that dude on the Saturday Night Live skit figured out a way to become the richest man in the world.
Speaker 1 | 41:03.807
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 41:04.768
In fact, quite a few of them are that way. So there is this kind of dynamic there of like… yes, we’re the service department because yes, we are customer service. Our customers are our end users and we’re serving them and the tickets are anything. But at the same time, there’s this, I don’t know, the way that the world is changing and where it’s going. You can wrap in security easily into that, into this dynamic as to why it’s, maybe why some of those, maybe some of them jumped to the dark side and became, were so arrogant that they’re just going to rob people. I’m like, screw this. I’m just going to become a, you know, I’m just going to go to the dark side. But there is this gap between, and I think you basically, you know, described it quite clearly. There’s a gap between the technology and the business side. I don’t see any reason why that can’t be bridged or why they can’t all work together in harmony. And that’s the ultimate goal, right? Because nothing in the company gets done without IT.
Speaker 1 | 42:10.590
Yeah, you have to have that manager or that person that can bridge that gap. I mean, and that’s hard to come by because people get technical, these technical people, sometimes they don’t have that person skill.
Speaker 0 | 42:22.356
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, but they’re probably, you know, yeah, unless they’ve got you, you know, then they’ve got to come out of the server closet, I guess.
Speaker 1 | 42:36.104
Yeah. And one last thing I’d like to say is, Even no matter how high you get up the rung in your career, never stop doing the work. Maybe just do less of that tech work, but never stop doing it. Dig in every once in a while. Dig into some projects that you might like. I mean, if I didn’t, I think I’d lose my mind.
Speaker 0 | 42:58.386
Yeah, because you’re not okay with just sitting and being a butt in the seat and just collecting a paycheck. It’d be too boring. It’d be too boring. You know, it’d be back to, you know, look, I’m just trying to make some gas money and you’d be serving tapes. You’d be pushing tapes into the system. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 43:19.424
Right.
Speaker 0 | 43:20.444
You know, so yeah, the, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much for your insight, especially the harvesting your strengths. So everyone out there listening, go out and harvest your strengths. And again, everyone listening, if you. like the show, please go to, if you don’t like the show, don’t do this. But if you do like the show, go to, um, yeah, iTunes, whatever.com and give us a real review, not just fill in the stars, like actually type something meaningful in Jeff. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 | 43:57.201
Hey, all mine.
