Speaker 0 | 00:09.665

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, from sunny Nevada, Adam Lopez, and Vice President Information Technology at the Goodwill of Nevada, which is no small… operation by any means. A lot of times people might think, oh, my small little goodwill in town here, but no, you guys are big time. How many, just out of curiosity, how many employees do you guys have, you know, locations spread across the state, just to kind of give you an idea of your operation there?

Speaker 1 | 00:48.521

Yeah, absolutely. So we have a little bit less than a thousand employee volunteers across our Southern Nevada.

Speaker 0 | 00:55.023

No one would have thought you’d said a thousand. You mean a thousand? It’s just a lot. And I was, we were talking for a few seconds. If you’re hiring right now, you said you were hiring. What are we hiring for? Like help desk or.

Speaker 1 | 01:09.907

We do a lot of green recycling with, you know, what do we do with those big CRTs? Right. What do we do with those big printers that you guys have sitting around that’s cheaper to buy a new printer than it is to buy these? Right.

Speaker 0 | 01:23.436

Quite sad, but true. Yes.

Speaker 1 | 01:25.097

Yeah, I know, right? So we take apart all that stuff and we get the, you know, there’s a little bit of gold in there, a little bit of, you know, whatever it is, and we kind of, you know, dismantle it and, you know, send most of it to Dell. We have a great contract with Dell that kind of takes on most of that stuff. And then the gold stuff, we kind of, you know, put on eBay and try to get a couple bucks. Nice.

Speaker 0 | 01:45.449

That’s one thing. How many people are working just doing that? So we have actually kind of a cool job. So you’re telling me you’re hiring people to just take machines apart and pull it out. I mean, gold prices are all the time.

Speaker 1 | 01:55.348

Why not?

Speaker 0 | 02:00.991

I’m buying gold. I bought gold for the first time. Like I, cause I had this gold guy calling me all the time and I was like, all right, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it this time. You know, you got to explain to me cause gold guys really get into the coins and like you really got to understand all of this and the spot price and all that type of thing. So yeah,

Speaker 1 | 02:18.864

A lot of logistics there. I’ve seen my couple of shows of the gold miners out there on

Speaker 0 | 02:28.266

A&E, right? That brought up a hotel memory watching gold miners. Anyways. Okay. So cool. You’re hiring guys to take apart old machines, mine the gold. Level one helped. Just out of curiosity, do you find it hard to, is the great resignation true? Because I know that where I’m at right now, half of the gas stations, you name it, Starbucks, whatever it is, we’re closing early due to a shortage of staff. What has happened to the world? Are people working?

Speaker 1 | 03:03.448

Good question. I get into dealings with the kids in the same kind of scenario, right? I tell them to find somebody to take my drink order.

Speaker 0 | 03:11.170

Where’s my chips and salsa?

Speaker 1 | 03:13.270

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 03:13.691

I mean.

Speaker 1 | 03:17.236

We do, I mean, again, we have the same program, right? We know we’re not the highest paid for it, but we’re paid, we’re not competing with Google. Our goal, our philosophy here is that we are, we understand, we understand that people need a startup, right? And that’s what our goal is. You come in, we’re going to train you up into these individual, you know, you know, if you have, if you’re coming in IT blind and, you know, you saw the Google ad and said, oh, become a project manager or become a cybersecurity analyst. We help you define those kind of goals, like understand that. So we have a training program that we’re working with, a company called Tech Impact, who’s putting those through. And we’re also working with Google right now on a grant to be able to help people say, hey, let’s get them in classes to understand first the basics. Level one security, what is a computer? What is A-plus certification? Super simple stuff. And then what’s unique about us, since we have such a big, you know, since we support such a big amount of, a large amount of people, we’re able to facet them up with one of my team members. So our training courses go, hey, you come in for a five-week training course. One of the weeks, you’re going to be with our network engineer. One week with our app team. One week with our cybersecurity. And one week with green, which is our environmental service. This gives you a little bit of a taste of everything. And then you’re understanding like, what is it I want to go after? And how can we supply that? How can we support that? Because again, a lot of young people just, they want to get an idea, just don’t know where they want to go. So let’s wet their whistle a little bit.

Speaker 0 | 04:55.716

IT blind. Let’s take off the blind. I love it. And. I have, again, talked with many people and I have my own biases as to where I would go if I had to go into IT and take a job. You know, there’s some that I would think would be fun and there’s some that would be like depressing. I think it’s in the ones that I think would be in the ones that you would think would be like a fun kind of exciting role, like maybe like software development or something. No, I think that would be the most depressing role. stuck in like a dark room with screen barn or a right room.

Speaker 1 | 05:29.628

The bad stuff where the 90% of your time is testing, right? The whole thing is cool stuff, but testing is like this blind.

Speaker 0 | 05:39.117

And the guys that I thought would be kind of miserable, like the data center guys, because they’re stuck in like what would seem like a prison all day, seem to be like the most happy, excited people. Because they’re just running cables and plugging stuff in and racking and stacking and making things, you know, in power and like compute power. And, you know, now we can rip it all down. Start over again.

Speaker 1 | 06:02.058

You know, they’re on their own. They’re on their own timeline, right? No one asks them what they do. It’s not like that, that hidden, like, we know they’re working because things are moving. But, you know,

Speaker 0 | 06:11.600

I just, I haven’t met an unhappy data center guy yet. That’s not to say that there aren’t out there, but I just, I haven’t met an angry data center guy. Now. I’ve met many disheveled, let down, kind of depressed, where’s my direction in life, IT directors and managers, which brings me to you. So you’re somewhat new to the organization. And I love the fresh start stories because typically, and I got done doing a cartoon with my book, I guess. project manager director guy before this because we have an editor and we’ve got this other thing too and he’s doing the he’s sending the cartoons off to the new york times guy but anyways and one of the cartoons is like phil i don’t know the caption for this cartoon and the caption for the cartoon basically it’s the it’s the it’s the men’s bathroom and the network closet in one so it’s it’s for everyone that’s had the you know the you’ve got your your rack you’ve got your power you and it’s in the bathroom This is a real thing. This really happens, right? And so he was like, I don’t know how to caption this. I was like, just put the new IT director and just put like, welcome to your new office or first day of work. You know, first day of work. So you mentioned Scrum in our previous conversation, which like you mentioned is the… time in a rugby match where like all the guys, like if you ever watch rugby or like all together in a circle and they’re all crowding together and somehow a ball pops out and we’re figuring this out. And you mentioned, you know, you were kind of like, it was like when you came in, it was really like that. It was like, okay, like, Hey, we’ll, we’ll take on this. We’ll take on that. What was it like coming into a new organization? What do you see? that was going well? What do you see as far as a digital transformation? Is there any insight there? Anything new that you pictured coming from your past experience into maybe the nonprofit with a considerably large number of end users? Any advice for new IT directors taking on a new role when you come in, you know, looking around what you see and what kind of changes need to be made type of thing?

Speaker 1 | 08:32.181

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think that mainly like… They always say when you go to a new job, you shouldn’t touch anything for, you know, you know, everyone has their different variations. Like don’t touch anything for a month, two months kind of scenario. Right. I think I’ve had that advice given to me by a couple like senior people that I look up to. Right. And I understand that. But where does that line fall when you’re just seeing everything just rolling around you? I got to stop the bleeding.

Speaker 0 | 08:58.959

Well, sometimes there’s a lot of it’s kind of like low hanging fruit. I guess you could say there’s a lot of, there might be some low hanging fruit, some things where, you know, quick wins I’ve heard. Cause I’ve heard people say, yeah, don’t touch anything. Don’t fire anyone. Don’t hire a bunch of, you know, whatever it is. Right. I’ve also had other people say, well, just get some quick wins too because there’s probably there’s low hanging fruit in every organization. It’s not to pick on the goodwill or anyone else. It’s going to be. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 | 09:25.668

And I think that’s with any IT organization, you know, coming from the casino industry, the same, we have the same philosophy. We do hire the same. problems when we come in. So, you know, mainly like, you know, and again, I, and I use the analogy from, you know, a rugby match because I have great people. I mean, the people I work with are phenomenal, right? My, you know, they’ve survived here through just your grit. You know, a lot of them are not like, you know, graduates from, you know, these.

Speaker 0 | 09:52.742

That’s the number one talent, right? Isn’t that what everyone wants? I’m pretty sure there’s a book. Isn’t there a book written? You know, isn’t there like, you know, okay, go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 10:01.182

But I love it though, because people that, you know, again, they just don’t give up, right. They’re just like, Hey, they’re either, they’re going to go after, but you know, but when you have that analogy of like, Hey, here comes the ball and everybody’s just dumping on it. You know, there’s no organization, there’s no, there’s no flow and there’s no ownership. Right. So it doesn’t give anyone the right, how do I call it the right ownership, the, the, the habit. Cause when you do something, when you. finish the goal or task or something like that you kind of take that self-private if you start it someone else takes it from you you you kind of get the point so when i came in here i was like okay we need to get set up so what i did is i split up i i self-promoted some of my out-of-depth teams so i said hey we don’t have a huge game here we understand that so what i said is like hey you know i brought in my office what what what keeps you up every day what’s going on and you know one of the young ladies here said i like cyber security great we have nobody over here today let’s get you started so she started researching all this stuff and i said hey we’re gonna update her of uh our network to coordinate so i said i want you to understand ford analyze we’re going to put that into our network you know it’s going to look at traffic we have some great that defend you know against our network but we want to get you know more understand our network traffic our bandwidth and be able to segmentate some of that and throw some of that traffic as it goes through uh another young lady hey i really like the application great Let’s get her another young man to network. So, you know, their time is spent half on the help desk answering calls, but the other half they’re spent doing something they enjoy. And what I found, what they did is that, you know, you’re not having to give them much direction. They’re just going after it. So now we have a weekly cybersecurity meeting with this young lady that I kind of self-promoted, and she’s digging into it. So we’re launching KnowBefore, which is your, you know, your basic, you know, software to let people know about, you know, spam. filtering and stuff like that and fishing spearfishing and stuff like that because we’re hitting which one is it which application i know before okay so you know again it’s just a kind of that that that training module to say what’s the lookout for what are these because again i think we’re all getting hit by those spearfishes right now you know and how do we how do we whack them you know like whack them all out there i had one that was so good the other day i can’t remember what it was like it almost got me i was like i can’t believe it almost got me Well, you know, they’re coming to LinkedIn now, which is interesting. So I had, I just started last week, I had someone sent an email on my behalf to our HR department said, Hey, you know, Adam Lopez, you know, can you please change my routing in ABA number four for, you know, for my tech, for my tech account? Of course, they flagged it, but, you know, It’s like, oh, he padded.

Speaker 0 | 12:44.054

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 12:45.514

But what we’re seeing a lot of right now is that, you know, a lot of the… The instance we’re seeing is ex-employees. Like, hey, this person’s left. No one cleaned them out of AD because they want to keep their email for, hey, I might get this random email. So that’s part of the job of going through and cleaning all that up. So we’ve been doing a huge cybersecurity initiative over the last probably two months here, and it’s been great. Our Microsoft score goes up, makes everybody happy, and it shows our network is doing a little bit better and stuff like that. So that’s kind of fun stuff like that. And then we have, you know, again, go back. So we have a network guy that’s, you know, really enjoying network. We’re installing Fortinet across our network. So super excited to get that traffic in there. And then also, you know, we have our development team that’s kind of working on some cool initiatives as far as inventory management. And as I explained to you earlier, I think our goal is to create a VR system.

Speaker 0 | 13:37.652

So that would be on the roadmap, so to speak.

Speaker 1 | 13:41.495

Yep, correct. when you’re a unique industry right i mean it’s not like we run these so yeah let me take goodwill has two parts right first is the philanthropy right philanthropy is what we do what we give back to the computer that’s a community that’s the most important right we have classes that we go through we have a cna class that we uh bring people through and the other arm of that is our retail class you know that’s the one you you donate it for and then you kind of see hey you know where does it kind of come from What comes out of that, that money then is given back. You know, not only is jobs, because we do hire a lot of people in the community, but we also have programs out there that supply that, that do training. We also provide bus vouchers. If you’re, you know, you don’t have enough money for a job interview, we’ll give you a career post that, you know, gives you a resume and also give you a $25 gift card or $50 gift card, something like that, for goodwill, and you can go out and get a new suit for yourself for an interview. So we do a lot of that stuff to be able to help support in our community because we want to make sure that’s our number one. That’s the number one goal.

Speaker 0 | 14:45.427

Does IT take any part in the… data gathering of such information. I would imagine that there’s a lot of data out there for inner city sections of the United States. There’s got to be a lot of data somewhere that would be very useful.

Speaker 1 | 15:12.015

And that’s my back. So that’s where I primarily focus in the industry was data analytics, data analysis. And so bringing that here, I’m able to understand where that… I mean, before I, you know, again, I think we’re starting to understand what do we do with it, right, first, and how do we collect it, right? Because I think we’re not doing a great job at it. You know, again, there’s always room to improve on collecting data and then mining it, of course, as well as we have. So I think the philanthropy part of it does a great job of it through, you know, our app. applications that support it but you know what happens the guy that just drops off right in the goodwill uh donation center how am i to say okay you dropped off a shirt but then the guy behind you drops off a louis vuitton you know luggage set right but how am i going to be able to say how can i track that guy right say hey you know what like the shirt guy is great i appreciate it here’s your email thank you very much but how do i get that guy that says thank you for dropping off that louis vuitton uh set because that’s gonna you know We’re going to put that on eBay. That’s going to give us some great money. And what do you help cost, right? So that only does to attract the donors to understand where their philanthropic is going towards, but also gives them that feeling like, hey, look, I helped create this job or I helped create this opportunity.

Speaker 0 | 16:31.132

Or vice versa, how many of those guys that you gave a $25 gift card to and a job application, got a job and were successful, what zip code did they come from? What zip code did they come from before then? I’m just fascinated sometimes with because I was looking at I’m doing some some non-profit work and sit on an admin board for another like one of the very poorest sections in Hartford, Connecticut and when I started looking up the demographics I mean there’s literally a road like Albany Avenue that you can draw a line and on one side of the road all the people for the next whatever, five blocks or whatever it is, make $25,000 a year, whatever it is. And then on the other side, they make $32,000 or $35,000 or more a year. So it’s amazing to me that literally a city block grid, that there can be that big of differences in unemployment and homeless rates or whatever the heck it is. And there’s some… way that we can track all that data or someone already has it. And then it’s a matter of how are we going to crunch all that data and make it useful to people. And then if we go into that neighborhood and we give them, um, clearly I have a bunch of kids in the background. Um, um, if we go into that neighborhood and then the goodwill starts doing X, Y, Z, or whatever organization, how can we track the data to see if it’s made any impact on that?

Speaker 1 | 18:01.389

And I think those are key indicators that you pointed out that aren’t currently being tracked, but again, how do we track those, right? So, no, those are great points. I was actually talking to our VP of mission services yesterday, and we were talking about that. How do we capitalize more off the data that we collect, and how do we get more of an understanding of, you know, not only donors, but also, as you hit on the head, like the individual. We do track some individuals, you know. We do have the people that we kind of keep in contact, but, I mean, do that from a broader perspective.

Speaker 0 | 18:33.935

perspective would be you know um budget budget there for it growth and everything how do you balance the budget at the goodwill and your philosophy in general on selling executive management that xyz upgrade is the right decision to make and we need to spend money in it And just in general, what are your thoughts on IT as a cost center versus business force multiplier? In your case, nonprofit force multiplier.

Speaker 1 | 19:11.079

Yeah, it’s huge, right? I mean, everyone’s looking at the dollars, right? We have a board committee that we have 12 people at the board. And we have to make sure that we present what we’re going to spend next year for the budget. And we have it’s a double in store because we have two. facets to manage. We have our philanthropic piece of it, and then we also have our retail piece. We know that the retail piece brings in the money, but for the most part, we do get grants and other stuff from the philanthropic piece of it. But how do we support both at the same time and make sure they’re both successful? This is my first year coming through the budget, so I shop for the moon and try to get as much as we can and be able to hold in that I feel we have.

Speaker 0 | 19:59.986

Did you shoot the moon successfully?

Speaker 1 | 20:02.988

Yeah, we’ll see. There’s a budget meeting in a couple of weeks. So I don’t know. I’m optimistic, but we’ll see. You know, my predecessor, that was here before, he had some good thoughts and bringing some stuff in. So he thought about, you know, we need to upgrade the network, right? We need to put in some failovers. We need to put in some, you know, some ER and some, you know, as well as some, you know, you know, just some redundancy. through our network to make sure that, hey, if our ISP goes down, we’re able to quickly pivot and go to another ISP or 5G or whatever that solution may be. So we’re putting that in place as we go for this year and then for next year as well. But it’s a tough thing. How I look at it is that two parts. One is that the budget. You try to shoot for the moon what you can. The second part that I like to look at is the actual cost savings that we can do for next year. And. I didn’t say hide, I don’t want to say hide the ball, but more like, okay, if I’m paying my ISP provider this, and they’re providing me end-to-end encryption, but I’m able to move over to, you know, a Fortinet that already has NET2Win in it, and that’s going to reduce my cost tremendously. But where can I allocate that money to, right? Because again, you know, I might save 5%, 10%, but I want to reallocate that to IT so that we’re not losing money.

Speaker 0 | 21:25.546

That same IT provider or the same circuit that’s coming from, we can just layer in a secondary circuit. Path redundancy, path redundancy.

Speaker 1 | 21:37.174

So that’s our goal there for now. And then also there’s other options, right? We’re using a company that kind of created what is our kind of pricing system, you know, and is there opportunity for us to develop our own, right? You know, we’re paying companies for it. Can we develop our own?

Speaker 0 | 21:52.104

What do you mean pricing system? What do you mean pricing system?

Speaker 1 | 21:54.678

So when your shirt comes in, right, you know, you donate your shirt, you know, we have a pricing system that says, hey, this is a large shirt. It’s red. It’s by, don’t take them on.

Speaker 0 | 22:06.482

Charge five bucks, charge 10 bucks, whatever.

Speaker 1 | 22:08.663

Absolutely. And then it does that, right? Interesting. How do we, you know, how do we first like, you know, make sure we’re not leaving money in the table? I think there’s some cool analytics we can do on that to say, hey, can we build some kind of API that kind of goes out to eBay and see what’s sold? and get a more accurate pricing on that, right? To understand if we’re leaving money on the table.

Speaker 0 | 22:29.125

That’s a data scientist piece there. Absolutely. That’s some kind of algorithm.

Speaker 1 | 22:33.309

I’m sure it’s out there, right? You just build it. But those are the kind of things that we’re doing. We also do a tremendous amount of money on our e-comps, which is books. So we do a tremendous amount of money on books. So a lot of these books that people donate are great. We have a system that kind of goes through and we have a, you know, it’s a manual system right now. We’re trying to automate this as well. is that we kind of go down the barcode the book and then we enter we we permanent salvage risk it’s just not worth anything uh if amazon wants to if it’s a good seller amazon or if it’s a good seller on ebay wow and then that that goes then into that i love hey it’s gonna go and it automatically the software is pretty slick it automatically automatically listed on ebay so it makes it available it goes into our counter system and then uh it’s shipped out once So that’s a kind of a cool initiative that we have there. And then, you know, how do we, from 5,000 foot, what other cost savings are there? So I see some other opportunities to do some cost savings on some other applications that we’re using and just going through that as far as, but it’s a tough balance because, like I said, you know, retail is the tail that wags the dog, right? We know it brings in a lot of money. We had a lot of money coming, but, you know, it has to be. It has to support all those people that work there at all the facilities. It’s a lot of manual labor. These guys, I give it to them. They go out there and just grind it out every day to make sure it’s separated, make sure it’s on the floor, make sure it looks pretty.

Speaker 0 | 24:03.794

It’s absurd. It’s absurd. I’ve seen the drop-off because I have eight kids. Every year I’m dropping off. I think one of the— All the Goodwills, sometimes the little donation form that you get back, some of them are like so busy. They just, I think they just sign a bunch of forms in the beginning and they just leave a stack of signed forms. Here, take it, take it. You can’t blame them,

Speaker 1 | 24:30.087

right? You know?

Speaker 0 | 24:30.908

This is not a dump site. This is not. This is sick.

Speaker 1 | 24:35.431

And we’re trying to grab analytics for these guys. Like, and they’re just like, hey, I count the cards. That’s all I do. So, again, I can’t ask you for anything more, right? You know, a future, like, you know. development would be, hey, can we put on some AI camera in there to track the cars that go through? Do we have a better understanding of what we’re doing?

Speaker 0 | 24:52.810

T-shirt sorter, clothing sorter. I mean, yeah, you could really get… Put Elon Musk on this one, you know. Forget about Mars. Forget about Mars. Like, seriously. Outstanding.

Speaker 1 | 25:07.015

See the robot that he came out with?

Speaker 0 | 25:09.296

All I saw was pictures. Was it actually doing anything?

Speaker 1 | 25:11.677

I heard it dance a little bit. I heard there’s lots of wires.

Speaker 0 | 25:17.120

He’s just mad at Boston Scientific. I think they’re beating him. I’m pretty sure we got like robots running and everyone’s like, you know, this is it. Terminator Armageddon. It’s real. It’s real. This is the beginning of the end. Let’s, um, let’s do a section of the show I haven’t done in a while, which is, um, it’s fun because I know that you’re of the same kind of generation as me, because we were talking about home healthcare services earlier. But And how I’m probably going to need that soon. What did you do? What was the most fun thing that you did prior to the invention of the internet?

Speaker 1 | 26:02.859

Oh, wow. Did that be IT related?

Speaker 0 | 26:08.681

I mean, I guess it could be. I would say not IT related, but I guess, yeah, prior to the internet, that does. You’re right. We were playing Nintendo and CD robs. We’re building three 8.6s. We do Oregon Spill,

Speaker 1 | 26:23.227

you know? Yeah, no,

Speaker 0 | 26:25.408

it has to be. Okay, sorry. It has to be. I guess I need to take technology out of you. God, I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 26:31.631

Not just football. Two-hand touch football. In my neighborhood, I grew up a little rough, so it never was really just two-hand touch. It was two-hand push, right?

Speaker 0 | 26:44.737

Nice.

Speaker 1 | 26:45.337

If you get that out.

Speaker 0 | 26:46.822

Yeah, remember the playgrounds? Yeah, I always loved the old 80s memes where it’s like, my slide versus your slide. My slide burnt us. It was like a metal thing with no edges on. My slide was like, you know, you fell. I remember a kid falling off just like the top of the slide. And like, yeah, it was so hot in the sun. It was basically just a piece of metal that like, you know, the playground was just a dirt pile. The playground was just a matted down dirt pile. I remember playing football. Yeah. But yeah. It was just, here, I’ll tell, I’ll share a story. Because I told my son the other day, I was like, don’t tell anyone this. Because I was like, if you did this now, if we did what I did when I was a kid, we’d all be in jail. You wouldn’t even be, you wouldn’t even be born. I was like, you wouldn’t even be born. Because I can’t remember what it was. We’re out serving. I was like, yeah, that guy would have gotten a drive-by with a paintball gun when I was a kid. As we did, we did drive-bys with paintball guns. We shot sparklers. with the metal part bent off out of co2 cartridge pellet guns we when i finally got my license i’m pretty sure we had roman candles out the window like driving down the street you just did crazy stuff back then and no one you just i don’t know how we didn’t get in severe trouble there was no no cell phones yeah You couldn’t just rip out a phone. It was like, we would take it, we would go by the beach and there’d be like crowds of people, you know, and a bunch of crowds of like, I don’t know, seniors or people older than us that, you know, whatever. And we’d light a, we’d light an M80 and like throw it in the middle of the group of people. We’d be like, we’d be like, look, you know, boom. And like, I’m probably revealing myself too much now. I’m not like this anymore. I’m not like this at all anymore. I’m so straight edge. I’m serious. I was telling my kids, I was like, yeah, you know, you just can’t, you can’t do that stuff. So that’s, that concludes this section of what we did prior to the internet. And then now it’s like, we’re lucky if people come out of their house and you don’t see kids that, if you see kids at a restaurant without on their phones, I see four, four high school kids are on their phones, but well, we’re responsible for it. It’s our fault. And you lead the, you’re leading the digital revolution. Okay. You’re, you’re. You’re making it worse. You’re training people how to keep this stuff up and running. I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 29:20.184

The kids would say, okay, I want to have the disaster freaking flowing all the way down. You know, I got this whole park. And it’s supposed to tell me of all this. My daughter right now is in Hamilton. Love Hamilton. Every soundtrack. Knows all the musicals. You know, they have some F-bombs in there. And like, it’s allergic. But I can’t set the damn thing up to say, at 10 o’clock, that damn thing better shut off. It just shuts off the Wi-Fi. But it’s getting smart enough now, like, I got apps that I can download the videos, and I can still play through it, right? So it’s an ongoing battle. It’s an ongoing battle.

Speaker 0 | 29:55.187

Yeah, it’s true. I do have to download it. I do have, like, the—that is the one— Google product that I own is all my kids, all my kids, like Google tablets. What’s wrong with me? Why am I having a brain? What do we call those things again?

Speaker 1 | 30:11.799

Family circle?

Speaker 0 | 30:13.480

Yeah, whatever. I have that. So I can shut down like, you know, so-and-so downloaded Zom’s Royale. How did he download that application? I shut that down. Delete. So I can like delete that, you know, I can see what’s going on. And then like, hey, mom, I need your password for a second. So I can. I need to do something for school, right? And then we see downloaded whatever game. I’m like, and then mom’s like, you lied to me. You said that. All right.

Speaker 1 | 30:38.276

Same thing. Like you give your kids credit cards. You think, okay, my kids are 11, right? 11 year old. So like, you know,

Speaker 0 | 30:48.879

no kids wait in my house.

Speaker 1 | 30:50.900

We just got them cell phones,

Speaker 0 | 30:52.840

right? Let me ask you a question though. First, let me ask you a question. How many kids do you have? Just two.

Speaker 1 | 30:56.001

Just two twins.

Speaker 0 | 30:57.222

That’s why. Oh, twins. Okay, well, great. Yeah, so they’re going to do everything for them forever. I’ll bet you guys do their laundry and, you know, feed. I bet you feed them, you know, for example. Like me, it’s like I’m looking at my kids like, hey, what’s for dinner? Why hasn’t the laundry been done? This needs to be vacuumed. And did you defrost the… Because it’s just not possible to bake. The orders will come out.

Speaker 1 | 31:22.395

They know, like, they’re up back in the distance. They’re getting, you know, cleaned up.

Speaker 0 | 31:29.739

I grew up in a rough neighborhood. We didn’t play touch football, let me tell you.

Speaker 1 | 31:36.361

You know, in Vegas, we don’t have the nicest weather. We’re in 100 degree weather and they’re doing yard work and like, hey, it’s part of the routine here, man.

Speaker 0 | 31:47.666

We need to trench 20 feet for the new fiber optics. The fiber optic, you know.

Speaker 1 | 31:55.789

Oh, what?

Speaker 0 | 31:56.470

have you ever have you read the have you read the will smith book uh-uh oh really great book so i mean i i read it before the whole you know controversy but really good i highly suggest it what was the controversy i’ve had a lot of i mean because i feel like he’s always in control hi the class of the christmas okay yeah i mean i have all my friends are from like i have probably like a good 20 of my friends are from philly like yeah hardcore like hardcore philly you Not like the Philly, like if I brought my parents down there, they’d be like, oh, get me out of here. Where are we? Anyways, but go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 32:28.590

No, no, no. Yeah, the same thing. So he talks about his growing up in that kind of scenario. But, you know, one of his things with growing up, his dad was like, he made him and his brother build a brick wall. And he talks about like, what do we, it is just a random brick wall in the middle of nowhere, right? And these guys had to do it. And just like, you know, they, you know, they had, they weren’t done until they’re done. his dad just made them just build this damn brick wall and his dad’s military so you know he’s having them report it at seven o’clock they’re building this damn wall and they’re like question why and you know more questions they ask of course the bigger the wall has to be trenchant trenchant trenchant but you know you know there’s a story behind it right of course taught him you know the discipline and you know kind of that kind of thing as he went through life stuff like that but uh yeah it was really interesting but you know it goes back to the family dynamic of you know again like scale you know as we grow these kids off of technology how do we how do we you know one how do we kind of separate them from that because again i think we’re going to have a generation of kids that are just born off of youtube right they’re just going to be they don’t know what to do outside and they’re going to have social anxiety they’re going to have this is what this is they don’t know anything outside of that and that’s going to be scary right how do we do how do we adapt to that and how do we you know how do we manage now so it’s not going to be that scary it

Speaker 0 | 33:47.844

is difficult i um I never thought I’d be a homeschooler. I was the guy that said that held all the stereotypes about homeschooling. I always wanted to kill the TV. One and then about eight years ago, I actually did took the TV and literally threw it away. Homeschool my kids believe that some of the traveling to like traveling can be some of the best education. And I don’t mean like traveling to like Disney World. I mean like traveling to like. a small village in the middle of nowhere in Egypt, in Egypt where the power goes out and there’s no toilet paper. And, but they come back and they’re like, that was the best experience of my life. And I remember, I just, I was, this came up the other day because I was, I, when I did go to Egypt and I’ve been to Egypt three times, two of the times I was thrown in jail because they thought I was like a fake spy from like, turkey or something with a fake American passport. No, honestly it probably was. But I understand why they did it. It was all good and I wouldn’t exchange any of the experiences at all because they… Because the guys that I was thrown in jail with too were like all, it was, they all had crazy stories and amazing stories too. And it was probably like 20 Palestinians. Complete side note, when you get thrown in jail in Egypt, there’s always going to be like 20 to 30 Palestinians in there. And the reason why is because they have no airstrip in, there’s no airstrip in the Gaza Strip anymore. So they can’t actually fly home. They have to fly into Egypt and then they have to go over through Gaza or whatever to get home. So- Because it’s a dangerous area at night, the Egyptian government purposely throws them in like the holding cell, keeps them all safe, feeds them, and then puts them on a bus the next day and takes them to the border themselves. So it’s actually like a good thing. So I was actually, so I’m in there talking with all these guys and I’m talking with this other guy and it’s like this, you know, wonderful, bad experience all at once. But when I did go with my kids and my daughter before, I went, we went to go visit a friend and he lives in. literally a very small village in Egypt. And we, the hospitality was unbelievable. And him and his brothers and stuff, they took us everywhere. They took us to like see the pyramids and all this stuff. And I just remember sitting down one night and we’re sitting around in this huge family, kind of like gathering. His brother, their kids are there. His other brother’s there. The, you know, the women are in another section and all the sisters, just this huge kind of like family. thing and they all live in this one kind of multi-story building. And then at the top of the building, there’s all this rebar coming out in case they need to build another story. And his brother asked me, okay, so like, what’s the best thing that you’ve seen so far? What’s the best thing that you’ve seen so far? And I said, it’s this right here. I was like, it’s this. I was like, I don’t think you understand. Like in America, it’s not like this. It might be like this. And some, because some people, if you have a really strong cultural background and you’ve kind of migrated to America, it might be like that for some. But I was like, my brother lives a mile and a half down the street. I haven’t seen him in five years because he’s got a thing or whatever it is. I was like, even though I tried to reach out to him, he’s got- whatever his thing is, you know? And he lives a mile and a half down the street. I was like, you guys eat every meal together. You know what I mean? Like you guys, your kids are like getting the kind of like, you know how they say like, whatever. Hillary Clinton didn’t say it, but she’s like famous for saying, you know, it takes a village to raise a child or something like that. That’s really happening here. Your kids are… outgoing and talkative and very respectful and they understand these different levels of how to speak to different people and elders and how to treat things and the level of servitude like a kid like the kids serve you know clean up it just kind of it’s like all natural I don’t really understand how to the other thing that’s kind of funny is like they don’t understand pets because there’s so many cats and dogs that just run around and it’s They’re like a cat will just run into the house and they’ll be like shooing the cat out with like a broom. Get out of here. Like you have these as pets. Like what? Anyways. So I don’t know how we got on that. It was something about the kids and the, the, the lockdown and throwing away the tea. Same way.

Speaker 1 | 38:17.402

Right. The only way I, you know, I went to high school, I learned about traveling and stuff like that. But like, you know, as I think I told you before the show, you know, I spent seven years traveling around the world on a cruise ship. So not, I didn’t do the luxury stuff. I was more, I managed the casino as well as, I did a lot of IT stuff there. Cut my teeth on a lot of learning in that instance, which was great. But I got to go to Egypt. I wasn’t in jail. I did my thing. I was going down to the tomb of King Cotton Tomb. And there’s these beautiful hieroglyphics on the wall, as you know, right? But you’re not allowed to take pictures because, you know, you’ve got this guy following you making sure you don’t take pictures. So I’m going in there and trying to sneak pictures as you go down. Right.

Speaker 0 | 39:01.447

Nowadays, it’s nothing. You just have a pen and you’d be like,

Speaker 1 | 39:04.109

right. Exactly. The guy comes up, you have to go shoulder, takes my camera. It’s a tourist kind of thing, right? All right. You pay him 20 bucks and he gets your camera.

Speaker 0 | 39:14.458

Oh yeah.

Speaker 1 | 39:14.758

Buck sheesh.

Speaker 0 | 39:16.900

Buck sheesh. Buck sheesh.

Speaker 1 | 39:18.261

Right. Exactly. That was why I got in trouble in Egypt. No, I love it. Again, that was, you know, I didn’t know he was. stuff. When I was traveling to Germany, going through checkpoints, Charlie, when you’re going through Africa on a safari.

Speaker 0 | 39:32.870

I’ve heard Germany can be a little strict with checkpoints.

Speaker 1 | 39:38.072

When we walked through, it was more of a picture-taking opportunity that I saw it as. This was probably 12 years ago. I haven’t been there lately. Could have changed, but it definitely is a lot different. Just traveling, I think, is a huge thing that we need to do and i know that you know that the technology is trying to bring you that you’re uh you know you put on the goggles or the vr and you’re kind of there but you think you’re still missing out that it’s not difficult to do either it’s really not that was you know being in these places right uh you know i remember i was i did a trip and was the this cruise ship would probably never do this again where we went through uh dubai we went to katar we went to Saudi Arabia, we went to Iran, we went through all the Arabic companies, and we went to Iran. And, you know, a foreigner here, a Mexican half-American guy in there, like, they don’t, you know, you look like…

Speaker 0 | 40:36.482

They’re probably just speaking Arabic to you. They thought you were Arab. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 40:41.925

so the first thing we did, we said, let’s go to, we had to get some money. We go over there, dollar bills, right? Like, okay, let’s go over there. We go to the bank, and, you know, we’re waiting in line. They say, hey, take a seat. And, you know, next thing we know, the guy comes downstairs and it’s the bank owner of the box, whatever. He said, you guys come with me. We’re like two American guys. Oh, yeah, we’re in for it now. They bring us upstairs and we’re sitting.

Speaker 0 | 41:05.885

Start serving you.

Speaker 1 | 41:07.646

He starts giving us tea. He’s like, tea is hot. He brings out the fluffer of tea. He’s like, will you come to my house and meet my family?

Speaker 0 | 41:17.230

It’s amazing, isn’t it? The hospitality is like. And Arab hospitality is like, if you haven’t experienced it, it’s on another level.

Speaker 1 | 41:25.814

Oh, it was amazing. It really was. He would.

Speaker 0 | 41:27.715

He’d have you come and stay overnight in his house. He would. All of that.

Speaker 1 | 41:31.917

We were only there for like maybe eight hours, right? We love people. We just can’t. But it was just, it was so fun just driving around and just kind of.

Speaker 0 | 41:47.304

seeing the different pictures you see on the news and it was it’s never what you see on the news it’s never the pictures on the wall oh that yeah yeah i guess i see what you’re saying from that standpoint yeah but um it’s not as scary being there is not as scary as like you know it was crazy um to not get off track on it I don’t think we figured this out yet. So I keep asking because someday someone’s going to have to answer. What’s the end goal? What’s the end goal for IT? And I’m not like a retirement guy. I do everything kind of backwards from everybody else. I’ll probably work forever and not work as well forever. So what’s kind of the end goal for IT people? So we’ve got kind of the younger generation that they should get off. They should get started, level one tech support. They should kind of do the, you know, just to kind of review going IT blind and kind of figure out, get a taste for all the different areas of IT. Don’t just think, you know, hey, I’m going into security like 90% of everybody now. You know, get a taste for it. So we got that. But what about the end game? What’s the, what’s kind of the, you know, for a dad with twins that’s VP of IT and that’s been in IT for a long time? you know, what’s kind of the end goal or what’s the purpose at the end of all this? What would you like to do or how do we get out? How do we cash out and just make, you know, millions and be done with it?

Speaker 1 | 43:17.859

Yeah, everyone.

Speaker 0 | 43:21.082

At least you said it, okay? If I said it, I’d be a money-grubbing, you know, money-hungry, like, selfish bastard. But anyways.

Speaker 1 | 43:27.507

It’s a minus two-path, right? You either want to, like, you know, I got a buddy that he’s a GM of, you know, in, like, the middle of Oregon nowhere. right like but it’s beautiful right no it’s about a half hour from the coast uh but he’s just like small casino not you know not a lot of pressure you know again so it’s either like hey you go work for a small like shop that you know that pays you enough to get by and you’re you could sustain their network their kind of gives them some ideas to grow and you know again you’re not looking to get rich off it but you were talking that’s one goal the other goal is is you know is to develop something that can be transformational for the for the next generation you application or through a service and you think of a lot of these as you go through as a leader because you’re an MIT leader you’re dabbling in every little bit of the of the industry and as a nor by heart which I was never but as I always wanted to be you know it was always one of those things that like you’re able to pick up a little thing but you know as you learn as we get older is that understanding is that key little thing that you know that’s missing in this you know paradigm uh is it is it feasible is it you know can you do it is it gonna take millions of dollars you know because again you know that doesn’t make sense but something that you know it’s always like that guy that i i know a friend of mine his father invented something that goes on a railroad engine because his park is about this big and his family set up for the rest of his life because and everybody needs that park kind of scenario so it’s the same kind of scenario like you’re you’re if you’re able to find that kind of that piece of the puzzle that can patent or kind of like hey the guy that you know the guy the classic guy is the credit card processing guy right the guy that you know he gets what you

Speaker 0 | 45:22.804

every time twice you know i you just reminded me of that you’re just reminding me of old man marley so old man marley was this old 92 year old dude that when i started out at this cisco startup company and we were out you know i had no knew nothing about technology and they’re sending us out into the streets to sell cisco iads and dynamic allocation and sip trunking and you know i walked into this pharmaceutical massive enclave of, so to speak, of massive buildings. One of them was completely empty, except for a cubicle. One cubicle off in a dark corner with a bunch of servers in the background. And the whole entire human genome was along the wall of this building. I found an old man back there and he talked to me for like three hours. And when I got back to the office, they’re like, Ooh, you ran into old man Marley. The guy sat on the atomic bomb committee, had worked with Einstein. He’s like, every time you flush your toilet, you pay me one one hundredth of a cent. One one hundredth of a cent because I invented this little thing that moves the turds around inside the sewage, inside the sewage, whatever plants. And he had all those servers in the background were running like the. very first type of crypto. It was insane, dude. He was doing something with, he’s like, the future is going to be like this, you know, he called it the elder dollar after his name. He’s like, we’ve got to base it on some level of human desire because that’s the only way that it’s going to work and we can’t use, you know, sex because that’s going to create disease. We’ve got to use like gambling or something. I was like, what is this guy talking about? It was wild, but that’s the memory that you just sparked. So what about this though, realistically? So what I’ve found being an entrepreneur that somehow made it is that why not just layer in what you already know and just rework the program, just rewrite the program. So from an IT director, this is what I’m thinking. I don’t think enough IT directors, VPs of IT, CTOs, CIOs, I don’t think enough of them have good MBOs, management by business objectives. Why not write into your contract? Why not sell yourself as part owner in the company? If I do X, as my job, I will come in as the director of IT and I will grow the profit margins by XYZ. And if I don’t, don’t pay me. But if I do, pay me a bonus. or give me some kind of stock options, or give me some kind of ownership so that I can cash out someday. Why not that?

Speaker 1 | 48:20.837

That’s a great philosophy. I think that, you know, IT is often overlooked as that, as you said, it’s also always looked at the cost center, but there’s opportunities where we’re growing into different facets that we can make money.

Speaker 0 | 48:35.106

If you just want to take a paycheck, fine. But as you get older and as you grow older, you’re going to realize that you’re worth more than you think you are. I think most IT guys are worth more than they think they are. And there’s people out there willing to pay you what you’re worth. You just need to find them. And you need to be good at, I don’t know, negotiating your own self-worth. And I think if you’re a hustler IT guy and you love what you do and you work hard, then you should be able to put into verbiage or into your work contract or something like that. Be willing to put your money where your mouth is or whatever that saying is supposed to be. Why not put it in your agreement and just say, hey, look, I want to raise, but I don’t want to raise just because. I want to raise and I’ll tie it to performance. I’ll tie it to performance. So I will overperform or I’ll outperform this metric or all, because what do all companies want? They want growth. All companies want, you know, you know, so why not tie yourself into that, tie your, tie technology into the growth of the company if you can. And if no one has any clue what I’m talking about, and this is flying over your head, like, whoa, how the hell do I do that? Just look up MBO, uh, MBO, um, you know, IT technology or something like that and start to figure out how. areas in your company that you could greatly influence that would, and this is just coming to the top of my head because I would, I see so many. people that are in our age range that have, I don’t know, I don’t want to work for another 30 years, not even 20, maybe 10. You know, so how do I get out? I want to think like, how do I make the next 10 years exciting? And how can I give back to society and the world over the next 10 years? And at the same time, how can I… self-perpetuate something so that I don’t have to, um, worry about, I don’t know, my weak 401k or something not being enough or the stock market tanking or something stupid, um, 10 years from now. Buy gold, get into recycling, get into green recycling. So anyways, um,

Speaker 1 | 51:06.028

I don’t know. Great advice. That’s the guy, you know, again, that great insights. I think that a lot of it, right. Again, I think that your typical, you know, CMOs are your marketing execs. They always think that way. Right. Cause again, they’re, you know, again, think about it. I think I look at marketing as that, you know, again, it’s needed, but they spend more money than us. Right. But they’re always acceptable because they, they’re able to move down bottom line.

Speaker 0 | 51:28.843

Uh, sales fix all problems, man. You have Mark Cuban as some guy that you follow on LinkedIn, whoever that dude is, Mark, but he says, what does he say? He says, Sales fix all problems.

Speaker 1 | 51:40.259

It is.

Speaker 0 | 51:40.679

So even if you can’t get the MBO from your own company or whatever it is, but I’m sure there’s a lot of IT things, a lot of other applications, other companies, other vendors, stupid thought leadership stuff.

Speaker 1 | 51:56.846

Your data analytics, we do such a hard time of, we do a lot of data analytics on the company itself, but what’s your self-value as a data analyst? as well like what have you saved on your bottom what have you kind of where have you pushed the button where have you made movements to to generate revenue as well as save revenue our e-waste program does make you know a significant amount not a huge amount but enough to you know take five people to work there as well as possibly and we’re looking at ways to expand how do we even get better at that So there are opportunities out there.

Speaker 0 | 52:32.334

That’s the low hanging fruit. So now that you’ve got the MBO ID in the back of your head, just go look for all this stuff that you’ve never reported on. Have that in your back pocket to whip out, you know? It’s like the sales guy. It’s like the sales guy that hit quota. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 52:49.019

but I think it’s famous for over the years. You know this. We don’t celebrate our wins enough, right? It’s always, what’s the next problem? Instead of celebrating our wins, we’re able to say, hey, you know what? In our team meetings that I have, once a month, I’ll say, what did we do? It went by so fast, and we’re already on to the next set of things. What did we accomplish? What did we do?

Speaker 0 | 53:13.088

The last outage cost us $2,000, and we had no outages for 12 months. So we saved the company like $15 million.

Speaker 1 | 53:23.073

And you learned that, you know, like this. I don’t know if you can demonetize that piece of advice, you know, from a point of view, like, you know, where does that come from?

Speaker 0 | 53:36.059

That would be used for my polo move, right? That’ll be the goal. All right. It was absolutely outstanding having you on the show. A lot of fun. Any final words or words of wisdom, or if there was any one thing you’d want to say to other people out there, maybe thinking of getting into IT or whatever it is that comes to the top of your head, what would that be?

Speaker 1 | 53:50.425

Yeah. I think I see changing. I think, you know, over the years, you know, it used to be the, you know, computer head just sitting in front of the keyboard. I think our role is more manageable in resources and vendors, right? That’s where our role is going. Because we’re getting smaller, we’re outsourcing a lot of stuff. So vendors are a big piece of that, as well as, you know, those relationships as we grow to be successful. So the key to that is that, you know, I think I deal with more. people you know i would say problems but uh you know opportunities uh then i do sometimes dealing with full i.t issues right because again the smart people are down there they’re way harder than me figuring on this but i need to make sure that hey i gotta keep their head on this level that they’re always making sure they’re they’re right they’re not looking to leave because there’s so many opportunities out there how do we address them to feed them knowledge feed them you know give them opportunity to grow not only personally, but also financially. So all those factors are in that we didn’t have to worry about that before. You know, the IBM days was, hey, you got a job as a programmer, you’re a programmer for 25 years, or something like that. And as a manager, we need to talk to that and say, people get tired of being that programmer, so you have to keep them excited and like, hey, what do you want to do next? Do you want to… You want to go into networking. How do you keep them excited? How do you promote them and stuff like that? So I think our job is changing from just a keyboard typer to more of a leader management role.

Speaker 0 | 55:22.832

Yeah, that’s great. That’s like a two-part answer. First part answer was delegation is key. Second part of that answer, you said earlier in the show, which I actually wrote down, which I thought was pretty amazing, which is if you start something and then you get taken off of that task, it kind of deflates you. And then you said… and then the next thing that you said was sitting down with people and asking them what gets them up every day so if

Speaker 1 | 55:46.909

I’ll be the first to admit I get lost in the weeds like I’m terrible but you know when I move it up and I understand I can see through the weeds then I’m like okay now I understand I can see my objective I see where I need to go you know and not everybody’s like that some people love me in the weeds I’m just not my kind of person hmm

Speaker 0 | 56:08.142

Outstanding. Well, thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Certainly a pleasure. And look forward to see the digital transformation and what happens with that budget conversation next week or next month or whenever that is.

Speaker 1 | 56:23.161

Absolutely. Sounds great.