Speaker 0 | 00:09.782
All right. Well, welcome back, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we have Ryan Lee, Director of IT. Hey, Ryan, how about giving us a little bit of your background and who you are, what you do, and what’s different about your industry?
Speaker 1 | 00:26.447
Awesome. Hey, Mike. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is exciting. So I guess I’ll jump right into the background topic. So I started my first idea that IT was going to be in my future, probably back in ninth grade. Like with every student, you start going through the careers class and look at what opportunities are out there. And I looked at teaching as one potential. I looked at being a lawyer. I looked at some law enforcement and started to have some self-awareness that, you know, spend just a little bit more than what I’m going to be comfortable doing on a teacher’s salary. I need more excitement in my life than what being a lawyer would provide unless I wanted to get into criminal law, which was not an avenue I wanted to go down. And I had just the right amount of self-preservation available that I didn’t really want to find myself in a scenario to be in law enforcement and have to be in any of those.
Speaker 0 | 01:26.928
I was going to point out the excitement piece and law enforcement.
Speaker 1 | 01:30.189
Those sound like they collide. Yeah, so definitely figuring out how to dial in my desire for excitement with my desire for not too much of it. Everything in small doses, for sure. So what it came down to is I settled on a career path in technology. I had a lot of friends in technology that were, you know, I grew up with some really smart kids. I had buddies that. third, fourth grade were writing little like flash code games on their, you know, Windows 95 computers and stuff that I was just impressed with and thought, you know, this seems cool. Like, I’m not quite at their level, but I think I can start to get successful in IT and maybe someday I’ll make a name for myself. So that’s what I did. And I went down that path for the rest of high school taking elective classes and things like that. I went to a a college in my hometown that’s pretty well known for football. Sadly, did not get a college scholarship in football for it. However, they did seem to be impressed with my technical abilities. So got a degree in management information systems and switched to computer science and started working in manufacturing right out of the, actually still in college as an intern. And then once I graduated, got on full time with that company.
Speaker 0 | 02:48.222
And did a.
Speaker 1 | 02:49.884
variety of roles so i got into application development worked in infrastructure worked in support did some project work eventually decided that my skill sets uh were getting underutilized and that i wanted to keep growing and developing and learning new things so i moved on to a new company uh worked at an msp for a while which if you’re ever looking for any kind of career growth whatsoever it’s like coming out of uh high school basketball and going straight into the NBA because I felt like a big fish in a little pond when I was at an internally facing IT group at a manufacturing company. And I got into the real world and all of a sudden I realized how much I did not know compared to some of my peers in the industry. So it was enlightening and it was a lot of work to catch up and learn. But I would say in the two and a half years I was there, it was easily worth it. 10 to 15 years at any other company I would have been at just from exposure from depth and breadth of technical background that I got access to and got ability to work on on a daily basis. So for instance, like I would be putting in a new firewall at my company once every five to seven years, right? You know, as you do an upgrade here, I was doing them once a week. So you can imagine just the volume of things that you’re working on how much better you get at doing that than you would at an internally facing company. So that was a great job.
Speaker 0 | 04:20.528
And one of the other things that you’ll run into doing that with MSPs is that each company has their different flavors. Like I’m sure that there’s probably one or two, or I hope there was at least one or two who wanted the exfiltration rules in place versus the majority of people who only pay attention to what’s inbound. And so You know, as you have that chance to work with multiple companies, you see more of the environment, not just handle a higher volume of deployments.
Speaker 1 | 04:51.135
Well, and yeah, that’s just the thing is the variety of companies, the company size, their appetite for risk. The ability to take direction and take guidance from somebody that’s selling them a product at the same time vary all over the board. So I would have companies that, you know, I tell them right away, like, I’m not commissioned. I’m here to put in a good technology stack for you that’s going to keep your company successful. It’ll keep you working well. And honestly, I really like putting in new stuff and working on things that are. well designed and well engineered and I don’t want to sell you junk. So I’m going to get something that’s going to be successful for you that’s going to cost you the right amount so you keep coming back and asking me to do new projects in the future because projects are fun. Support is not as fun when you put in something that isn’t easy to support. So that was definitely something that if I could give advice to anyone in IT it’s work at an MSP for a couple of years and you will be most well-rounded. full stack engineer, whether that’s network or development or support or analytics and applications that you will ever be. It’s huge. So I did that for quite a while. I found out I had a bad personality type for working in an MSP. So I’m a problem solver, right? When there is anything that is broken, or if there’s an opportunity to make something better, coming out of that manufacturing environment, I’m not here. if you’re working manufacturing, but they have a it’s more of a mindset. It was developed by the by Toyota. So they’re kind of the gold standard manufacturing. And they call it Kaizen right where it’s loosely means like continuous improvement or always be making things better. So better to versus we need the best solution today. Like, let’s get in a good solution, then just keep working on improving it day in and day out. Never settle never say we’ve reached the pinnacle of what we can do. Just keep making it better each week, each year. And that works fine when you’re at a company where there’s a finite amount of things that you can work on. When you have 500 customers all with that same finite amount of things, it all of a sudden works into an infinite amount of things you can work on. And I have no ability to say no when there’s something on fire and I have a unique skill set that can solve it. So I found myself just working. way, way too many hours. And being on the road, not seeing the family got to be a bit much. Were I able to, and it wasn’t my company either. It was all me on the work-life balance of just, I couldn’t say no to emergencies and tickets and things when they popped up or projects. So I was out and working nonstop, but eventually decided, you know, I wanted to get back in. I’d been managing teams. and helping to mentor and do stuff a little bit as an architect, but not nearly at the level I had done in my manufacturing career. So opportunity at an engineering firm came up, and they wanted somebody to take over their infrastructure team. They had taken out a lot of technical debt, needed to get up to the 21st century and understand and optimize that group so that the company could be nimble and quick. So hopped into that. found that I really enjoyed. I had a great team, so that’s the huge part. Being a manager is awesome when you have a great team. Being a manager when you have people that are hard to manage is really when you find out whether you want to be a leader in IT or if you want to be an individual contributor. Not that you can’t be a leader as an individual contributor, but that management aspect really is telling once you have some problematic things. Luckily, I had been the team in my manufacturing company that had all of the interns and new hires come through. And then I kind of sent them in the directions that they fit the best. So they would come in fresh out of college. We’d kind of get a feel for them, understand how they work, what they were good at, if we wanted to keep them on, stuff like that. And then I would coach and mentor them in the direction that seemed like they wanted to go and set them off to be a business analyst or be an app developer, be an infrastructure, you know, sysadmin or network engineer. go into the support team start doing process and procedure and change management and so i got a lot of exposure to all types of i.t staff and all types of personalities so that was where i discovered yeah even when it’s bad i still at the end of the day enjoy leading and coaching and mentoring that probably comes back from my desire to be a teacher back in the day but so i had a great team at uh this engineering firm they made me super successful you know they knocked out projects left and right yeah but we did in a couple of years what it had taken them 10 years before that to accomplish. So it was just exciting to be a part of the team that was doing that. Some changes came to the company. We had some leadership retirements and things like that that had come through. And all of a sudden, I found myself taking over the entire team when the opportunity came up, which is exciting. Got to get more exposure to some of the analytics and application development. uh to find more change management and process and controls and uh love that a lot uh and then eventually had an opportunity at a trucking company where i was able to come in and find a team that they’ve been in a huge m a phase so uh there is over the course of the last five years i think they’ve absorbed six or seven companies you know they’ve doubled and doubled again and doubled again their company says And throughout the next year, there’s plans to double and double yet again their company size again with the next year or two. So we’re in a very dynamic environment today, which is fun. Getting to define kind of from the ground up what an IT department looks like, taking single IT staff, you know, the one sysadmin at a company that did everything and is now morphing into. you know kind of a consolidated team where people are specialized into infrastructure into apps and security and to support and uh defining how that looks so that’s where i’m going today so talk to me a little bit about the current environment that you’re working in how many people how many staff sitting at a computer so there is uh overall we have a very strange structure with the amount of mergers and acquisitions that we’ve done uh so it’s hard to exactly define who all we support and who all is under the purview of other groups. It’s very, the lines are blurred, I’ll say. So there’s a corporate environment, there’s operating companies underneath that corporate environment, there’s operating companies underneath operating companies, and there’s operating companies underneath those operating companies. So in our direct sphere of influence for my team, there is, what is there? There’s, I want to say about 400 staff at a computer. and then another 1,200 drivers or something like that throughout the org as a whole, which we also support but not on paper do we always need to support. There’s another 1,700 staff and then probably another five to ten thousand drivers. So drivers are very minimal support. I think of them like maybe factory workers where they might have a machine in front of them that they use. but it’s not a day-in, day-out machine that needs constant maintenance and attention. It’s very static in the way that it’s ran.
Speaker 0 | 12:56.835
Okay. Well, and of course, I’m in the transportation industry also, and so I know a lot about the struggles of what you’re dealing with there. And just curious for myself, how many different TMSs, transportation management systems, how many different mobile comm systems?
Speaker 1 | 13:16.891
are you dealing with because those are two major pieces of all of this that makes it all work but yeah so we have uh three different tms’s that we regularly deal with uh the major player being the cloud which i’m sure you’re familiar with that it’s kind of the um hopefully there’s no mcleod people listening to this but i’ll say in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king it’s a good platform there’s just a lot of uh Single points of failure that when you need feature enhancements and changes that happen that you’re not able to do it yourself. And you got to get in line and wait for them, which can get frustrating when you want to be nimble and adaptable. But yeah, it’s a good product. I mean, it does what it needs to do. And it’s honestly, I mean, out of anything else that’s out there, it seems to hold its weight pretty well.
Speaker 0 | 14:10.219
Okay. So 3TMS is how many different mobile comps?
Speaker 1 | 14:14.182
We have… two main mobile comms that we use. There’s a smattering of random ones out there. I want to say three or four more from companies we’ve inherited that have one or two trucks still using a different system, but two main mobile comms that we use. Those are coming out of our main parent corporation. Then we had a rather large acquisition of a Canadian entity that was using something that was not cost effective to centralize on yet. So it’s one of those, as attrition happens, we centralize and are working towards getting to… If there’s one thing I can’t stand in IT, and I was as guilty of this as any IT guy that has ever existed. But when you first start out in IT, you do it because it’s cool. You can DIY things and you can find the most cost-effective way to jury-rig this system together. And at the end of the day, what you end up having is a very cheap solution that’s cheap for a reason. And no one else can support it. And no one else can ever log into it or do anything with it because it was created by you. IT people and myself included are bad at documentation. So I’ve gotten to the point now where after seeing enough environments that were DIY together, that I want off the shelf, standard solutions that any engineer can come in and say, Oh, this was set up according to some pretty well defined best practices. And I know what I’m doing in here so that I always follow that get hit by a bus scenario. If the company is going to crash and burn in a horrific airplane accident tomorrow, how are we going to sustain operations? So that’s where I simplify, simplify, simplify, consolidate on one single platform. It’s not always going to be the cheapest, but it’s going to be the easiest to support in the long term. Human capital is the most expensive part of IT. So let’s find ways to reduce the need for that as much as possible.
Speaker 0 | 16:17.775
So, you know, that’s a perfect one. That’s one of the things that a lot of us run into. And, you know, I noticed one of the things inside of your experience was data centers and the ability to work with the data centers. Now, how many of those data centers are a data center in a closet? Because, you know, the DIY solutions you’re talking about, those data centers in a closet are exactly that. And we find ourselves inheriting those and or building them. Because, you know, when I started this organization, We were 400 trucks and a quarter of the size. And now we’ve got like multiple organizations like you’re talking about, dealing with all of those, all of the different workers, all of the different systems. And yes, there’s some advantage to the quick, fast DIY today. But tomorrow, it’s up.
Speaker 1 | 17:11.666
You pay the price. You know,
Speaker 0 | 17:13.267
yeah, you’re like, okay, how do we untangle this spaghetti ball and keep everything working at the same time? So, you know, the data centers in a closet have caused me so much pain. What have you developed any kind of methodology to help you get through those and to remove those kinds of things? Because I still find myself struggling with that. And you’ve got to, too, with all of the different chiefs in all of the different tribes trying to tell you, no, this is how we’re going to spend our money. They want the cheapest solution. And, you know, one of the things that… somebody told me early in my career here was there is nothing as expensive as the cheapest solution that is exactly it so what i typically do is i like to lay
Speaker 1 | 18:05.372
some groundwork right away with anyone set some expectations so as we’re looking at a merger and acquisition um is what’s the tech stack what are we currently going on hopefully i’ve done my homework enough to have a defined runbook or playbook of what we’re going to use and support and what’s going to be our default list of items say on infrastructure side like what are we going to pick for network gear what are we going to pick for routers and firewalls like what are our standards there and then uh it’s easier at that point once you have that defined when you get a new company to say does this fit in the tech stack can it communicate what is the end of life date during a acquisition that’s one of the easiest times to scrap things that don’t need to exist anymore. So being realistic about what it’s going to cost, you know, if they are looking, oh, this is such a good deal on this company. Oh, yeah, it’s a good deal because their tech is 10 years out of date. So while it might cost X number of dollars for the staff acquisition, the headcount, the customer Rolodex, you’re also going to be paying a lot of capital on a lot of upgrades right off the bat that you need to get to. So I start with that, lay that groundwork of, yeah, the IT spend for this acquisition is going to be 50 grand, 100 grand, 200 grand, whatever it is, right away. And they go, that’s not going to be reasonable. I say, well, that’s what it’s going to do to have a successful group if you want them to run Optimize like we do here. And I use that, and then I can dial it back from there and say, but we can stretch it out over a two-year period or whatever. But I always set an end date. So if I’m going to get new companies in, I’ll set an end date on when this has to be moved over so that we’re not supporting multiple systems. Otherwise. it’s going to be a discussion about headcount increase. So, I mean, do you want to pay for the headcount or pay for the equipment? We can do either one, and I’m happy to support whatever. I’m going to say from a business standpoint, and I’ve worked in ESOPs typically where an argument flies a little further, but this is a lot more cost effective to just pay the price now and do it the right way instead of paying it twice down the road. When it comes to DIY solutions, just to get it done now, I set end dates on those ones as well. So I go. oh yeah we have a a sales opportunity where we need something in this market tomorrow we need a company or like a location just a brick and mortar location and we’re gonna just throw out some equipment yeah okay but the end date’s six months at six months we’re either deciding to go all in you know it’s the um i don’t know how to phrase that in a way that’s right but it’s either uh sitting down or getting off the uh stool i will say
Speaker 0 | 20:55.076
It’s all right. Say it the way you want.
Speaker 1 | 20:56.416
Yeah, I’m sure you can understand the hard and common phrasing of that. But, yeah, I set an end date on, okay, if we’re going to be here longer term than this, now we need to go all in. And if we do get out six months later, we’ll have that as spare equipment for the next office. So it’s still not the end of the world.
Speaker 0 | 21:16.084
Okay. One of the things that you mentioned earlier was, you know, bringing in the interns and working with Sounds like Another area of common ground, training the employees up versus going out to the market and finding the people with the level of expertise and bringing those in. Because you typically pay more for that human capital and the interns that you hire and bring in, or at least in my experience, the ones that we hire and teach and cultivate. You don’t necessarily know exactly where they’re going to end up, but you have a chance to build them up. And. it’s um there’s a savings there how well a financial immediate savings but it’s a time investment so there’s you know there’s that distinct trade-offs there yeah thoughts so i everything
Speaker 1 | 22:09.736
in balance right i i’ve never been somebody to be black and white about everything everything’s a shade of gray to me uh i will hire outside talent when the need dictates so if there’s a timeline that i can’t meet with a training program and with the staff that I have today. I’ll hire outside talent to fill an immediate role if that’s something that’s getting dictated to by the business and we can’t think outside the box enough to come up with a solution that’ll get us by in the interim. And I will also pull in talent from places that I’ve worked in the past that where I already know the staff, I know what they’re capable of and I don’t need to spend the runtime to… get them that political and relationship capital that they would need to typically establish as a new company. So I’ll do that occasionally. But yeah, definitely, I will pull in new staff. I’ll take junior staff. And there’s one thing that pissed me off so much when I was young in my career was the phrasing of, well, I had to do this. Why shouldn’t you? Or you got to put in your time or everybody’s got to serve some time in the trenches, right? So those are three statements that I had heard. day in and day out that just bothered me to no end. And I always made it a personal goal that I’m going to take attitude first before anything else. So it’s attitude and that includes their camaraderie, their ability to communicate, their work ethic, things like that. And the technical can come afterwards. Like if they have technical, great, but then attitude first. I’ve had bad attitudes on teams. The net gain from even a really strong technical background. when you have that type of personality, still it decreases the effectiveness of the rest of the team so much that there is, I mean, if Bill Gates had a bad attitude, I would still not hire him for all of his experience and background and technical skills if he’s going to bring down the rest of the team, because he’s not going to add enough value for what he’s subtracting from everyone else. So hire for attitude, build in that technical skill set when I can, and I make training a huge priority. That’s another thing that drives me bonkers is just the hubris that we’re good enough. We know all of these things that nobody else knows. Or we’re the smartest one on the team, so why should we keep learning? Nothing that will ever fly on my team. So it’s one of those, like, we do training weekly. I get oral site subscriptions every company I ever go to. Get LinkedIn learning, whatever the platforming choice is. Usually there’s some sort of internal training program for soft skills, leadership, communication, stuff like that. And. you’re going to them like there’s you don’t get the option to say oh no i’m already really good at networking i’m already really good at uh I’m already really good at changing management. No, you can get better. If I’m not perfect at it yet, and I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, then nobody’s perfect yet. So let’s keep working on getting better every single day. So that’s where everything keeps changing, man. And that’s the other thing. If you’re not training, I spend 10 hours a week minimum training. So I get it in podcasts, right? So I’ll do that at the gym in the morning for an hour or two each morning. Then I spend my lunch breaks, typically catching up on tech news, staying up to date on security issues on the latest tech that’s coming into the space, how we can utilize that in our environment. And I’ll spend three or four hours minimum on Pluralsight every week trying to learn a new technology from a very technical standpoint. And then pepper in leadership classes, courses, retreats, you know, Cisco Live or go to Microsoft or something. pepper those in throughout the year too,
Speaker 0 | 25:58.141
just to augment the rest of the training you’re doing. Yeah, I like the networking that I can get at conferences, you know, and starting to learn from the peers and just talking to the peers and hearing different ideas. It doesn’t have to be in the same industry or in one sense, we’re all in the same industry because we’re tech and we go across everything. But then, you know, what I can learn from somebody that’s in the public sector working with schools compared to transportation compared to warehousing compared to um just everything so um what where do you get your security feeds what do you listen to for security news where do you uh so quite a few different sources um a
Speaker 1 | 26:40.327
lot of those come on my podcast in the morning because so i’m this crazy person that gets up at 4 30 in the morning I won’t say I’m at the gym by 4.30 in the morning, but I am up at 4.30. There might be a snooze or two that happens on the alarm system. I might take 35 minutes to walk 10 feet, you know, to put my contacts in. But I’ll get up at 4.30. I try to get to the gym by 5 o’clock, 5.30, somewhere in there. And it’s nice because first thing in the morning, you’re getting all of these security feeds. So I’ll do like CISO daily. There’s couple other ones yes you think i’d remember the names of them but since i only ever listen and don’t actually uh cyber security lines is the one that’s my constant every morning that’s the one that five ten minutes and you’ll have all of the major things that are happening so if it’s something that you know exists in your environment you can do something about it right away so it’s not uncommon for me to be uh walking rather slowly on the treadmill in the morning because i’m firing off three or four emails to say hey get And I know you’re supposed to protect your personal time. And, you know, if you’re at the gym, you’re at the gym for a reason. I use it just as another time to get a couple, you know, get ahead on a few things once in a while. I’m guilty, sue me. But I’ll shoot some emails off and just get some stuff started so that when people are getting into the office at 7, 8 o’clock, you know, we can go, hey, is this flaw or vulnerability affecting us? Do we have the equipment that’s called out in these CVs? Is there any kind of risk that we’re at today that needs to be addressed immediately that we should start alerting, setting up meetings with the rest of senior leadership so we can do something about? So that’s where I get a lot of info is typically there. The other one is I’ll do. So I’ve never been in a company that’s big enough to have a large internal security team. So we’re always getting SOC as a service. Currently, my partner of choice is Arctic Wolf. Hopefully, they send me some swag after they listen to this. But so I’ve used Arctic Wolf at a few different places. They’re great. But the nice thing that they’ll do is on top of, you know, just the log monitoring, the different vulnerabilities and stuff is they’ll send out alerts for major things. You know, there’s a million alerts come out each week. 98% of them never. are going to impact my company or my environment or niche area. But there’s 2% that do because they impact everyone. Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, the big ones when they come out, those hit everybody. So they’ll send those out fairly regularly. And those are nice to stay up to date because not only do they give you here’s the vulnerability, I’ll give you here’s exactly how to deal with it and how to patch it, how to address it, and all of their recommendations. So I use that. quite a bit too.
Speaker 0 | 29:39.691
Let me jump in for a second just because I understand how they work and I’ve been talking with them some too. So with all of the nested organizations, And all of the different things like that. When you do this, are you doing this at the corporate level? And I was also wondering about the teams. Do you have a bunch of separate teams per nested organization, or is it a single IT group that’s across everybody?
Speaker 1 | 30:05.392
Every one of those?
Speaker 0 | 30:07.894
Wow,
Speaker 1 | 30:08.194
yeah. So it is nested teams.
Speaker 0 | 30:10.075
So the politics abound.
Speaker 1 | 30:11.976
Yeah, and that’s part of what I’ve been working on since I started is consolidating that group into not… multiple jacks of all trades in every single area, but instead trying to get them into functional units. So, you know, I’m trying to spin up and move people over from, hey, I’m the sysadmin, I’m the network engineer, I’m the security person. I’m also the report builder and analytics and going, we got guys that are really good at that. Like, what’s your passion? What’s your desire? Okay, sweet. I’m going to narrow your focus, but broaden your depth on what it is you can do there and get those teams out of there. But… Currently, so many people know so much about so many things that I rely on my team a ton to tell me what’s in the environment. So because of all of this different stuff we’ve inherited, I’ll go, hey, this came out. I know you guys have some of this stuff. Does this impact you at all? And that, you know, it’s easy to ignore those if you have a busy morning, something’s on fire or whatever. This kind of forces up when the process is over. Does this impact us to look at it closely to go, oh, yeah, that does actually hit some of our equipment. and they can respond and give us some info on that. Plus they’re a lot of times able to, nowadays I’m getting that, what do they call it, the leadership lobotomy, where you start to lose it if you’re not using it on the technical skill set and they’re able to a lot of times educate me quite extensively on what’s happening with some of that equipment and how it affects us and how it’s being used in the environments.
Speaker 0 | 31:44.233
This leads me towards a couple other things. At one point, we were talking about silos. And so it sounds like you’ve got silos of silos of silos. So how are you breaking through some of those? What are tips or tricks that you’ve learned over time to deal with some of those or to get through it? To overcome a leader of one of those nested organizations. who says, no, I’ve got my guys. They know my business. They know this building. Leave them alone. We’re going to do our stuff. And you’re going, wait a minute. That system is completely vulnerable, and you’re putting the rest of us at risk because that’s there.
Speaker 1 | 32:32.492
How do you do that? What have you learned to deal with that? Yeah, it’s a typically common cause. So my biggest thing is ask 100 IT people in a room. how they feel about their work-life balance. And if you don’t have a minimum of 99, say, I don’t like it. I work way too much. I need more of the balance. I would be very surprised because I have never been in that scenario yet to find somebody that’s happy with the amount of time they’re spending at home or with their family or what they’re doing. And so that’s usually one of the easiest opportunities there is, is to find that common cause and say, look, my goal is to make sure that you can work a lot closer to eight to five than what you’ve been doing for the last five, ten, fifteen years. So help me to help you do that. We start with documentation, we start getting access to different people saying, here’s what you need to log into or to get us logins for. So we can start to get exposure. And then if you bring those functional groups together, okay, everyone that deals with infrastructure, we have a Monday morning meeting. We all talk about the infrastructure problems that are coming up. If there’s reoccurring ones, hey, team, let’s group think how we can address it and get rid of this stuff so we can get on to standards that everyone can support and maintain. At that point, your silos are just naturally breaking down. Sometimes there’s silos that aren’t caused by just general happenstance that, you know, this is the way it’s always been. It’s more of a directed silo because I’ve heard people say as. ridiculous as it sounds, that’s my job security, which is the most narrow sighted thing that I’ve ever heard. But I’m very, I’m usually pretty congenial. I’m very aggressive when it comes to people that are actively causing silos to happen because it gives a self a sense of self importance or job security or whatever the idea is behind it. I’m very aggressive at dealing with those typically in segments. zero tolerance policy on my teams that you’re going to withhold information or training or exposure to someone else because of whatever reason you have.
Speaker 0 | 34:51.507
Yeah, those people who don’t want to give the documentation, don’t want to help share, don’t want to teach, don’t want to… They actually, in my experience, most of the ones that I’ve run into, don’t want to grow either. They’re not looking to continue that education that you were talking about earlier. They’re not looking… They’re happy in that little catbird seat that they’re in, and they want to protect that fiefdom.
Speaker 1 | 35:13.035
Oh, yeah. And there’s a multitude of reasons how they get there, and some of it’s not always nefarious, but… A second opportunity for dealing with that is I do have a lot of expectations around training and growth and development. And the biggest thing that I’ve ever found is when you’re not, I say if you’re not learning or earning, that’s when complacency sets in really bad. And that’s when you start getting jaded employees who then instill that attitude into people closest to them, usually other peers on the team. And then your customer base starts to see that as well. So I try to make sure that everybody’s always moving. There’s a moving target that they’re aiming towards as far as growth and opportunities. I set a career development plan in front of them. And it might not always be that they want to move up the ladder and take on leadership roles. But here’s where you’re going to get more depth in the areas that you love and enjoy. So you might not always go the management route, but you’ll go eventually to an architect route. So if you’re a developer, yeah, you’re going to be. a junior and then you’re going to be at dev one and then you’re going to be a senior and pretty soon well not pretty soon but inevitably i want you at the architect role where you are as good as you can be at this particular function and are helping other people to grow and learn um same with infrastructure same with support you know i never want anyone just sitting in the same role for the next 20 years and if leadership’s not for them it’s not for them but
Speaker 0 | 36:43.510
they’re going to get better technically at what they’re doing so that they can place it so you never sense it and uh they don’t those things like silos don’t even get a chance to form or they naturally dissolve because how do you how do you justify or how do you get management to agree to a 20 to 25 percent um time budget for education you You mentioned that at least for yourself. I assume that since you’re setting that goal for yourself, you’re setting that same kind of goal for those that are behind you. So how do you get them to agree to it and give you the space?
Speaker 1 | 37:20.579
Yeah. So the big thing is, it’s easier with IT than I would say, where I have a very big luxury in the IT group because the work-life balance has never really been there. So if you start introducing automation and processes that help to… fix some of that work-life balance if you subtract 10 hours from their working time you don’t always have to subtract 10 you can subtract five they still have a net gain and the company is getting a five-hour net gain of learning or a more effective employee so i balance some of that with those things when there’s down time instead of standing around bsing and then having you know another uh peer of mine in the leadership team walk by and go oh i saw your team sitting around doing nothing again. Like, why do we even pay those guys? Instead, you know, they can spend that time learning, right? And they’re still able to take a break from the grind of the day-to-day activities, but they’re doing something that’s still going to add value to the company. And then the other piece is just simple ROI. I can think of one quick scenario that I was in as a very junior employee. I ran into, I want to say it was like it always is, some DNS issue. uh that i didn’t know how to solve uh and i had asked for training in the past on it and uh i had a leader that had a mentality of uh that’s an on-the-job opportunity so when it happens and breaks that’s when you can learn how it works and fix it and whatever i’m not gonna say that’s every leader’s taught me something some have taught me what not to do so i ran into that scenario uh happened to be a bad mix of events that Some of my management was out, the people that had access and the knowledge to fix these things were out. So I spent the first hour of this problem just trying to understand how to get into the system, and the next hour trying to understand how to fix it. And in that course of time, if you’re familiar with manufacturing at all, downtime like that from an IT standpoint that keeps any, keeps, you know, there’s linear events that happen in manufacturing. When you stop one thing, it’s a chain of events that goes all the way down the line. And an hour or two of downtime is multi-millions of dollars lost at a company. So after that, I was able to get the training I needed. And I found in the first chapter that I’d read, 15 minutes into training, where I needed to go. And I would have… very intuitively knowing how to fix this issue right off the bat. And I had that training where that was where I got that mindset of, well, thousands of hours, you know, my time is not as valuable as 500 to 1000 manufacturing folks all running at the same time. So I could do this course 1000 times before it cost the company more money than it did not having me done the course in the first. So that’s usually I throw out a couple examples like that, we go, Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 0 | 40:21.223
We should have you guys training five hours a week. That’s a good one. I like that for sure. What’s the area of the organization you struggle with the most? I know you mentioned that human capital is the most expensive piece. Is that the piece that you find yourself banging your head against the wall on the most too?
Speaker 1 | 40:47.894
Not always. So my and this comes more from a personality type than anything else is, like I said, I’m kind of stoic when it comes to fatalistic, maybe that, you know, what’s going to happen is what’s going to happen. I don’t need to have all of the background or have a lot of heads up like it’s not going to rattle me or disturb me. And the I do it. and I have to do it, but it’s the laying the groundwork and the framework of here’s a change that’s coming, getting everyone kind of ready and accustomed to it, whether it impacts them or not, just knowing that it’s coming. Because I’m not that way, it’s very hard for me to empathize with other people that changes are coming and that you just have to deal with it. I’ve always been one of those guys that when something goes wrong, you roll up your sleeves and you start dealing with it. I’ve never had to get my brain wrapped around what the problem is and how it happened and why. If I want to deal with it, I just roll up my sleeves and deal with it. So when I meet other people that don’t, that’s always hard for me to need to empathize with that and understand that not everyone is a mirror image of myself when it comes to personality.
Speaker 0 | 42:02.115
See, one of the things that we’ve recently really started on a new venture of, we’re so good at rolling up the sleeves and just jumping in and trying to fix things. We’ve really… really started to take that question of why to a whole nother level you know i’ve been teaching my help desk guys for decades now um you know when somebody comes to you and says hey i need you to do this um i ask i get them to ask well why what are you trying to do because they come in and tell us how they want excel to do this thing and we’re like okay and we run off and we make excel do it the way they want it and come to find out that they wanted to be able to run a report that’s already in the system that they just have to push a button for, put the parameters in, push the button, and boom, there it is. So I’ve taught them to do that, but now we’re starting to ask another question of, okay, well, this is your goal, but we’re starting to look at those processes to make sure that the process didn’t fail and that we’re, I can’t think of a better way of saying it, but we’re idiot proofing the system. versus working with the process to make the process better. It’s that Kaizen mentality of, you know, well, don’t just fix this problem just because it’s broken. What led to the problem? How did it manifest? So that why, you know? So have you run into anything in those?
Speaker 1 | 43:33.460
So a lot of that kind of goes around change management and ITIL. So I designate certain people that are good at… looking at the big picture of things and again with balance. So I’m huge on balance, right? So if one person comes in and says, I have a password, you know, my password’s not working and I didn’t change anything. I don’t know what’s happening. If it happens one time, bandaid it quick, reset their password, make sure they can log in, good. But if you see that come in three times today, start to correlate that and go, what’s happening here? And what do we need to do to like, let’s not bandaid it three times because now it’s becoming a waste. Let’s bandaid it the first time. Let’s note it the second time that this has already happened once, say, and the third time. Let’s dig into this pretty deep, ask all the questions why, when it’s problems. When it’s requests or services required, that’s always where the why comes in. And it’s, I educate all my staff is. Being the most technical is not the name of the game. It’s understanding your business. That’s the name of the game. So what does this person do? What’s their role? And you get that you’re a technical guy or gal. I don’t care. I want you to. go outside of your comfort zone understand people build relationships know what it is that they’re working on what their function is in the company and put yourself in their shoes on what they’re asking and then try to understand what it is that they’re really looking for and what’s going to make them more effective and how can we use it to make them more effective so that’s an individual coaching session or the level in that now it’s coaching the leaders of my groups to coach their teammates
Speaker 0 | 45:17.212
or the universe and those same things yeah you know i’m hearing a lot of the same things that we’ve got to get to the goal and understand the business understand the why of what we’re what we’re trying to achieve and then because there’s a lot of times that that with our broader knowledge or our experience across so many different silos or so many different departments or or systems that we know of solutions that are already out there that they just don’t know about they can’t conceive of that solution just because they don’t have that experience. And we get like you were talking about with the MSPs, you’ve got so much more broader experience that you, now you had a whole new, well, like two or three different toolboxes to the, the solution.
Speaker 1 | 46:04.868
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 0 | 46:06.629
What’s, what’s your most memorable help desk? project, something that just, you know, one of those ones that when you’ve had a couple of beers on St. Patrick’s Day and you’re telling somebody who doesn’t necessarily know IT one of those stories, what is one of those stories for us?
Speaker 1 | 46:27.825
So sadly, I was never proactive enough to ever write down or save any like really good IT tickets or emails that have come across or ridiculous things that have happened like i’m really bad i’m never the guy with the camera taking the picture to remember this event forever uh but i do have one we think i do have one uh zero right away into my career that was memorable for me just because of the amount of exercise i got out of it so uh so i worked in manufacturing we had a for the industry we were in and for the company it was their largest manufacturing plant in all of North America and it stretched on forever. It was one of those things that just been added on to over the years. So we’ll build a building here. This should be capacity. Oh, demand has gone up. Let’s build another building that can do the same thing. Let’s build another one out here. Oh, we can’t ship out of this building anymore because there’s no more room because we’re doing production here. Let’s build a shipping building out here. And it just kept stretching on forever and ever. So I get a call. Somebody is having an input output issue. I mean, mostly on the end part. aka their mouse wasn’t working right so um i go through the standard line of questions i don’t want to offend them by you know sounding degrading or anything saying did you plug it in um because you know i’ve seen people do that and i’ve seen how the response goes and i’d rather build a relationship not burn a bridge uh and so i ask them some questions and i go through the standard like okay can you receive all of the cables for me to make sure that there’s not just uh an issue or temporary glitch there and This person right off the bat had been very defensive on the call from the very get go and very irritated because they’ve been dealing with it for a while prior to calling. And they said, are you trying to ask me if it’s plugged in? Don’t you think I already checked that? And I was like, well, they’re Nelly. I’m not trying to offend anyone. Like, I’m just this is a common thing. It’s one of the first steps I do. It’s a simple question I’m asking. Can you try that for me? Yeah, I’ve already tried it. Oh, OK. Sounds great. Well. Sounds like you’ve done everything that you can on your end. I’ll just come on out there, which had been their suggestion, you know, five times at that point is that I just needed to come out there and look at it. For me, there was reluctance there because I could get them up and running in five minutes if they did some of this first troubleshooting, or it would be about a 30-minute walk for me to get out there. No joke, walking straight there was just about a mile. Or a little over a mile, actually, now that I think about it. And so I make my way out there, I get out there. And if you’re familiar with the old Dell Optiplex series, so it’s an Optiplex, what was it, like a 510, 520? You got all those USB ports right on the front. It laid flat, so you’d set your one single 17 or 19-inch monitor on top of it. And we had just started getting into USB devices versus the old PS2s, if that’s dating me at all. So there’s USB mouse. We 5S everything. in manufacturing, it’s straight, standardized, sweep. My lean guys would yell at me since I don’t remember the rest of those, but essentially it’s clean up your room, right? That’s the goal of what 5Sing is. So desks are spotless for the most part, as is this one. It’s a desktop. It’s a monitor. It’s a mouse and keyboard plugged into the front of the desktop. The mouse clearly has a cable going about three feet or about a foot in front of it, wrapped into a circle, sitting right there, obviously not plugged into the machine. So I get there. I’m sweating bullets at this point. It’s like 90 degrees outside, and I just walked over a mile through lasers. blast furnaces and everything firing off. And I look, I look at them, I look at the thing again to just see if like I’m getting pranked right now. And I’m not, I take the mouse, I plug it in, I move it and I just walk out the door. There is nothing appropriate I can say in this scenario that won’t get me fired. I’m just going to leave. But yeah, that was, you know, trust but verify I guess is where that comes from.
Speaker 0 | 50:47.985
Yeah. Oh, I’ve had too many of those kinds of scenarios. I spent like an hour and a half trying to troubleshoot a computer that wouldn’t turn on until I finally asked, OK, when you hit the power button, what shows on the screen? And they finally gave me enough of a hint that I’m like, OK, you’re hitting this power button. That other box that we’ve been checking the cables on, there’s a power button on that one. Try that button.
Speaker 1 | 51:17.678
It works.
Speaker 0 | 51:19.499
I just couldn’t believe. Sometimes the simplest solution is the Occam’s razor, you know?
Speaker 1 | 51:27.505
Oh, yeah. Yep, every time. Well,
Speaker 0 | 51:30.668
we’re running tight on time. Is there anything that you want to upsell? Any of your personal things? You’re doing a podcast. I noticed that you’re a coach for a soccer team. What is it? You got any personal things that this is your moment to spotlight the, you know, the All About Me page?
Speaker 1 | 51:49.582
Yeah, no, it’s from my standpoint. Like I said, I’ve always been huge into training and to growing other talent and making sure that the struggles that I faced early on in my career and even today, trying to make sure those are removed as much as possible for the next group of people to come through. So, I mean, if anybody listening that needs help or needs advice. I get about 4000 messages on LinkedIn a day for selling stuff. I ignored 90% of those unless it’s something I’m actively interested in. But if it’s a, hey, I’m just reaching out to you because I want to get some guidance or some coaching or some mentorship, happy to help whenever and however I can, time permitting. I’m obviously not a, you know, you’ve alluded to some of my extracurriculars have, that’s one of many, you know, different boards, different organizations I serve on. the hobbies are too numerous to count the hunting of the outdoor activities i just started getting into book binding so i’m trying to preface that by saying like i’m not going to give you a thousand hours a week but if you want to reach out and need advice or need help or need some guidance on career development on what to learn next where should i go into it um you know i’m dealing with issues happy to reach out and you can be a complete stranger but if you get a good attitude and you’re nice and polite i will I’d be happy to give you any help and guidance that I can with the stuff that I’ve learned, or more importantly, the mistakes that I’ve made, so you don’t need to make the same ones that I’ve done.
Speaker 0 | 53:21.780
Awesome. That’s very kind of you, Ryan. And so everybody, remember, Ryan Lee, you can find him. There’ll be links from the podcast to him. And for exactly that, if you’ve got those questions and you want to learn more, and I’m actually going to hit you up on that book, Bindy. I’ve got a book that my father gave to my son. um of the um mark twain yeah mark twain’s writings and the book is just the binding on it’s just falling apart and the only ones i’ve found have been people who do like refurbished bibles yeah so if you’ve got some hints and places that i can go because i want to do that for a gift for my son so that that book lasts longer i
Speaker 1 | 54:03.148
will definitely i have so i just started getting into it mostly that means i’ve spent hundreds maybe closer to more than that amounts of dollars on the equipment and stuff to do it. But there is some great resources online that we can talk about after the podcast. And there’s a lot of cool stuff that you can do there that I would be, I love to talk anything nerdy. So definitely this or anything else I am happy to help with. That’s exciting. Well,
Speaker 0 | 54:33.842
it’s been a great conversation, Ryan. Thank you for the time. And everyone, Ryan Lee, Discerning Popular IT Nerds.
Speaker 1 | 54:42.222
Thank you, sir. Thanks, Mike. It’s been great talking with you. Great talking to you.
