Speaker 0 | 00:09.587
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, Mike Kelly is going to be interviewing John Hust. So, John, why don’t you give us a little of your background and tell us about where you came from and how you became a popular IT nerd?
Speaker 1 | 00:26.681
Yeah. Hey, Mike. Thanks for… Thanks for having me on. You know, I started in, you know, back in 92, I’m dating myself a little bit. You know, I had a child and back then everybody wanted experience, right? Hey, you know, come work for me, but you need experience. And then I was like, how can I get experience if I can’t get a job, right? So I did find a temporary job with a telecom company and I was just cleaning up 66 blocks. with that company and I’m like, well, this is not going to work long term. It was just a part-time gig. And I decided to join the Air Force. And I got pretty lucky in the Air Force. I was put into the telecom world, which really started me down the path of IT. So I started with layer one of the OSI model, running cables, punching down telephone cables in Germany, you know, tip ring A1A, if you’re familiar with that. And, you know, I spent 24 years in the Air Force, four years in active duty, 10 years in the Air Force Reserves in Milwaukee, and 10 years in the Guard in Tennessee. So I got all aspects of the Air Force, and it gave me a lot of leadership opportunities within the Air Force. I got out of the telephone world and went into desktop support. moved to server support within the Air Force, which obviously that’s a great job on the outside, right? It was not many people in the military get a job that they can translate directly to the outside workforce. So I just worked my way up. Again, go ahead.
Speaker 0 | 02:24.234
I was going to, you know, actually talking about doing stuff in 92 and saying that that um dates you i think what you were dusting off dates you more than that because i bet you there’s like 30 of the people who are listening they go hey uh what so yeah do me a favor tell them what a 66 block is because i know what they are and i’ve had to deal with them and i’ve had to punch down a 66 block to to get that pots line working that’s
Speaker 1 | 02:53.136
right that’s right pots line yeah 60s it it looks like a looks like a rectangle with a bunch of metal hooks on it that you take these if you were to take apart a cat5 cable or a cat3 cable back in the day you would take those and loop it through and then there was a tool that would punch it down and cut it off so it was nice and clean but it allowed for a electrical contact on one of those those metal contacts and then it gave you three or four more so you could add things to it so if you wanted to add a phone you could add up to three phones right if you needed more you could just loop it down to the next to the next lugs and add up even more. In the Air Force in Germany, we were doing 25 pair, 50 pair, 100 pair. So you got to know all the color codes.
Speaker 0 | 03:42.037
So these are big, thick wires or a wire, what we’d call a wire, but it’s a wire of wires. The individual coded wires so that you can take a pair out, put them onto that 66 block and then get the signal through, right?
Speaker 1 | 03:57.850
That’s right. That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 03:59.111
Yeah. So, all right, Air Force, doing Air Force and doing it as the reserves. That was one of the things that, you know, as somebody else in our podcast likes to say, you know, I was doing the cyber stock and looking at your LinkedIn page. And I’m like, wait a minute, Air Force from A to B, from like 92, you said 24 years. So from 92 until, what is that, 16?
Speaker 1 | 04:25.893
2016, that’s right.
Speaker 0 | 04:27.934
Yeah, and so. And then I saw experience at other organizations in between. And I’m like, wait, how do you get an external job while you’re working at the Air Force or enlisted at the Air Force? Now I get it. Okay. Because I didn’t even think about the reserves. So lots of networking experience. Keep going with that. That’s where I interrupted you.
Speaker 1 | 04:50.162
Yeah. You know, that’s the nice thing about the Guard and Reserve is it allows you to work. I mean, you have a full-time job and you do one week in a month, two weeks a year. with the Air Force Reserve Guard. And I was fortunate that I was working in the same career field in the Air Force as I was in the civilian side. I had an opportunity when I moved to Nashville to work for a company called Gaylord Entertainment, large hotels. So that was my first experience with a large enterprise customer. And I talk about customer because I’ve been working as a customer. I’ve been… working as a bar, a value-added reseller. I’ve been with a manufacturer, but now I’m back with a customer and I’ve jumped around my career. But, you know, it’ll…
Speaker 0 | 05:40.055
I keep getting chances to talk to people who’ve worked at bars. I’ve never worked at a bar lately, but like the last three people that I’ve talked to have all been at a bar at some point in their history. So quick, another quick question about, so I know the Gaylord Entertainment Group and… And I know Nashville, do they have another hotel besides the Gaylord Opry?
Speaker 1 | 06:02.148
They do. You know, and for those Gaylord people that are listening, you know, part of the service basics is know your stuff about the company. They have, is it five locations? They have one in Texas. They have one in Florida. They have one in Gaylord National. And they just opened one up in the Gaylord Rockies, just outside of Denver. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 06:23.997
So when you were working for them, you were doing more than… Nothing. just the Opry, Gaylord Opry in Nashville. You were helping out the other locations. One of them’s in Dallas. So I’ve been to, no, I’ve actually been to three of them. So the Gaylord in Dallas, I’ve been to the Opry and then one in, I believe, Orlando.
Speaker 1 | 06:43.432
Yeah. And I worked at the corporate office and the IT staff at the hotels, they would call us the Avery Tower. So they said I worked at the Avery Tower. But, you know, we helped design the network stack that supported the businesses and it supported the customers when they came in if they needed wireless in the convention centers.
Speaker 0 | 07:06.509
Yeah, and those convention centers, man, I’ve been to multiple conventions at each of these and the network needs that any one of those given conventions. Half the time I’m doing it as a convention for IT people. And everybody’s walking around with at least one device, if not two, using the Wi-Fi of the hotel and probably VPNs on it because we’ve got to keep our stuff secure and hidden. And so just watching the needs that pop up. I mean, it’s like you… Set everything up and then you have to tear it down and then you got to set it up and you had to tear it down. And then because it’s got electricity and wiring, I’m sure you had to deal with all of the audio stuff, too. Audio and visual, right?
Speaker 1 | 08:02.038
That’s right. Yeah, everything ran across the network there. You know, the hotel is a little bit like a hospital. I haven’t worked at a hospital yet, but the impact’s the same, right? They want heads and beds. and that’s the same goal of a hospital, right? It’s just not life-threatening. But working in an environment like that, those hotels are anywhere from 2,800 rooms down to 1,500 rooms. You really had to know the ins and outs of networking and understand the big picture of what needed to happen for people to be at your facility and have a great experience.
Speaker 0 | 08:40.172
Yeah, because, I mean, if… Any of you out there that haven’t thought about this, think about, you know, 1,500 nodes in a single building. And that’s just for the room connectivity. So that’s just so that they can have wireless in their room and so that their TV talks on the internal network to the internal video server and or streaming server so that they have the satellite services and everything else. And that the front desk can put in, hey. Hello, Mr. Kelly, welcome to your room, and you can do your checkout, all of that stuff. And that’s just the standard stuff. And then you throw in a convention of 600, 700 people at the same time, if not 1,000 or 1,500 people, because you want that convention to fill all those rooms. So if you’ve got 15,000 rooms or 1,500 rooms, it’s a bit of networking.
Speaker 1 | 09:42.010
That’s true. I mean, and think about when you have six or 700 people in a single convention space, how do you lay out a access point floor plan to support them without causing too much interference just from the access points itself? So that was a lot of enterprise experience. And when you think about understanding the big picture, and that’s going sort of toward the leadership, how I got from a network engineer into leadership, was just not thinking of an individual task. Like, hey, I need to fix this access point. But what’s the bigger picture, right? Understanding how to build large enterprise networks that are resilient and can provide… uptime to the business when it needs it.
Speaker 0 | 10:32.265
Yeah. And that’s, I mean, all of those are really important parts is one, recognizing the larger goal, not just the, hey, here’s the immediate task in front of me, but this task leads to that goal. And what are the nuances around it? Or how can you potentially meet that task? by doing something completely different, but stay within the larger goal. You know, those being able to see that and understand that and provide those solutions so that the person above you who’s tasked you with that doesn’t have to. That they can say, hey, make this happen. And you do. And then they’re like, oh, hey, now I can give you more.
Speaker 1 | 11:21.096
That’s right. You know, we left Gaylord. We were told to leave Gaylord because Gaylord Entertainment sold out to Marriott. So today those Gaylord hotels are ran by Marriott itself. And that gave me an opportunity to go into the bar space, the value added retail space, which gave additional insight. You know, like we weren’t just focused on a single product. We were focused on all kinds of products that could help. businesses like Gaylord maintain uptime, right? So that gave me a lot of it.
Speaker 0 | 12:04.453
Was it a national VAR? Was it a local VAR?
Speaker 1 | 12:08.716
It was, they were out of Nashville and their headquarters was out of Florida. So I focused primarily on Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas was primarily my area. And it was a good experience to see the sales side of things and to be able to solve complex problems. Walk in, every day you walk out of the customer’s office feeling like a hero because you just solved their problem. And you do it every day. You didn’t have to worry about the daily grind of change management and downtime because a lot of times they were down.
Speaker 0 | 12:54.086
right so you just walked in and brought them back up yeah that’s gonna be a nice feeling and then not having to do all of the paperwork to for the cleanup afterwards that’s right or paperwork documentation sorry that’s right yes more of more of the thing that that we in it are famous for not doing yes
Speaker 1 | 13:16.032
but one one great part of that when we were designing we documented before we did it One, you had to for the customer and say, hey, this is what we’re going to do. And then they would approve it or not approve it. So you had your design done prior. There was always changes to it, but the major goal was already done.
Speaker 0 | 13:40.323
Yeah. And I guess since they’re already asking you to help them instantiate the change, you’re not really having to go through all of the, okay, here’s what we want. Here’s the value it provides. Here’s the. ROI that you’ll get from it. Here’s the steps and the timelines and all of that aspect of change management. Or actually, you may have had to provide some of that too, depending on the company.
Speaker 1 | 14:06.777
We had to provide a rollback plan.
Speaker 0 | 14:09.378
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 14:10.319
Yeah. Any changes we did, we had to do a rollback plan, which should be done with any change that you make, right?
Speaker 0 | 14:17.523
Yeah. Never paint yourself into a corner. Always give yourself an out. And if possible, always try to make sure that you have a plan to get back to right where you started. Because I can’t tell you how many times it was like,
Speaker 1 | 14:32.904
crap,
Speaker 0 | 14:35.145
revert, revert.
Speaker 1 | 14:37.126
Right. Well, and being in the network space too, 99% of your changes were done in the middle of the night. So if you run into an issue that you have to roll back, you’re not in a good state of mind mentally because you’re so tired. to figure out what the rollback plan is. Normally you can you can figure it out. But it takes longer. If you start with the rollback plan at the start, it’s just a cut and paste in whatever it is.
Speaker 0 | 15:08.082
And then, well, you know, one of the other fun things about doing network changes or changes like that in the middle of the night is that you’re not sure whether everything went smooth until you’re under full load again. And by that time, you’re really tired because now you’ve been up. 24 hours or you’ve been up all night and you’re ready to say okay i’m done it’s been i’ve been working for 16 hours it’s time to get some sleep if you’re lucky it’s only 16 um and and then suddenly everybody’s coming on the network and putting it under load and that’s when you really start to see the cracks in the uh in the design if if there are any it’s true so you know all right The value or the VAR, all networking stuff there, or did you start to branch out and do more?
Speaker 1 | 16:01.394
I started doing some voice. But, I mean, when I was in the Air Force, I started with voice. So it was a pretty natural fit.
Speaker 0 | 16:10.960
PBX or VoIP?
Speaker 1 | 16:12.722
VoIP. Okay. Yeah. I don’t think I’ve done PBX since I’ve gotten out of the Air Force. It’s always primarily been VoIP.
Speaker 0 | 16:25.438
Okay. Hopefully everybody knows what that is. I don’t want to explain it. It’s yesterday. Now it’s UCAS.
Speaker 1 | 16:31.003
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 16:35.247
Oh, man.
Speaker 1 | 16:36.267
You know, while I was with the bar, I had an opportunity to interview with Dollar General. I’m sure everybody knows who Dollar General is. They’re in every five miles of every street you go on. And, you know, it wasn’t a good fit at the time. You know, I turned it down. I turned down the opportunity. And six months later, they came back and said, I know you turned down this job, but will you take the architect position? Would you be open to doing that? And I thought to myself, how many times does a company that you turned down call you back and ask you if you want to come back to them with a different position, right? And I’m glad I did because I met a mentor there, Rob Massey, who… is still at Dollar General today. He’s a great mentor, not from a technical perspective, but just from a people perspective. And he always encouraged me to think outside the box. So whenever there was a problem, once I got in there, I always asked my question, what questions is Rob going to ask me? So I can come to the table with those answers already. And that was always a big benefit to anything we did, whether it was a change, whether it was a purchase, whether it was a troubleshooting session. And the other valuable piece that I learned was when you’re troubleshooting, always give a time when you’re going to come back with a response. Because if you don’t do that, if you don’t say, hey, I’m going to update you in one hour, I’m going to update you in 30 minutes, people are going to bug you every five to 10 minutes. What’s the update? What’s the update? What’s the update? Right? So there was a lot of people at Dollar General that were great mentors. He’s one of the ones that stands out. So I don’t want to leave anybody out, but he’s one of them that helped me in my leadership roles, getting into a leadership role. position, even though my primary focus in the past was always on network. I was the network manager at Dollar General. Again, at the time, it was 17,000 stores that we were responsible for. So again, just building resilient networks in a retail space, when the network’s down at any retail space, it’s costing the company money. So how do we solve it? How do we solve it quickly? How do we validate? How do we be proactive? That’s a big one on finding issues before they happen. And I know that’s a tough one for most people to figure out because through my career, everybody blames the network because it’s sort of the black box, right? It’s the black box. Hey, my server’s not working. What’s wrong with the network? And it seems like a lot of network guys are very familiar with reading packet captures. And I think that’s why a lot of people… just come to the network team in general.
Speaker 0 | 19:52.446
So, you know, I have captures and I laugh when you say when there’s a problem, most people think it’s network. We had a running joke here with my last network admin, and he was actually my last director of IT. And he’s one of the interviewees that I talked to earlier. But we used to always joke, it’s the network. And he would take it so personally. He’s like, no, it’s the network. absolutely but man you know you want to talk about going cross-eyed or or talking full-on geek start trying to talk a packet capture to somebody that’s right um and i’ve read more than a few and i understand them so i i can i can nerd out on that one completely but there’s so much good information in there if and when you can start to see it and start recognizing those patterns and hey wait a minute what’s this computer doing talking to this guy You know, it’s as simple as that sometimes. You know, who’s our destination and who’s talking to them? And should they all be talking to them? Or wait a minute, why is nobody talking to them? Okay, now it’s the network.
Speaker 1 | 21:07.533
Right. And, you know, a PCAP is a point in time, right? And it is hard to troubleshoot with point in time. Like, when is this going to happen again? You know, set up a… continuous packet capture and hopefully you catch it and hopefully you you find the data in the capture that points to the problem right so um you know having a long-term pcap to show um potentially standard deviation is is really how to make every network engineer sane again i you know one example We had a continuous, I’ll just call it a continuous packet capture going on. Wired data analytics, maybe I’ll call it that. And we had the server team say, hey, what’s wrong with the network? My server’s not working. We were able to go and look at midnight the night before and say, what happened to your server at midnight? Because it quit doing HTTP calls. And here’s the data to prove it. They’re like, oh, yeah, no, we rebooted it. It looks like the web server didn’t come back on again.
Speaker 0 | 22:12.453
There you go.
Speaker 1 | 22:13.634
Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 22:13.774
right. Not the network.
Speaker 1 | 22:15.674
Nope, nope. So that’s always a lifesaver.
Speaker 0 | 22:19.095
Yeah. Okay, so the mentor. You mentioned what are the questions he’s going to ask? What were some of those questions? What are the questions that he gave you that you still ask today?
Speaker 1 | 22:34.800
Yeah, you know, what’s the impact is always the big one. What’s the impact? Is it, you know, at Dollar General? Is it 10 stores? Is it 1,000 stores? Is it a region? What’s the anticipated repair time? And it was always, I’ll give you an update in 30 minutes. The big piece is if you’re troubleshooting, you can’t do comms. So you need one person doing communication and one person troubleshooting. The minute you get your head down into troubleshooting, you forget about time. It goes by so fast. So that was always the first point.
Speaker 0 | 23:18.816
Especially when the impact is 100 or 1,000 endpoints, stores in this case. And they think about it in one term of, hey, these employees are standing around twiddling their thumbs, but they also think about it of. What are the potential sales that I cannot collect on because I can’t run credit cards or I can’t do transactions? I can’t acknowledge the fact that that person’s 21 when they want to buy that dollar beer. Actually, I don’t even think dollar general sales beer, but I know some of the dollar stores do. All right. So at the bar dealing. Well, wait, no, you left the bar, got to dollar general. you’re doing that you’re starting to see bigger impacts you’re managing huge networks um made it to manager keep going um you know and just just as as manager understanding um you
Speaker 1 | 24:17.720
know really being proactive and network monitoring and building relationships with um the different teams you know not only building relationships down um but building relationships sideways you in the organization and building relationships ups. And that’s not just building relationships, but being able to influence those people, right? How do I influence down? How do I influence up? And how do I influence sideways to make the organization a better place? Because you may have a great idea, but if you can’t influence people,
Speaker 0 | 24:51.588
to go along with your idea then it’s going to go nowhere too too true so you know and using today’s terms i’m thinking of like um the uh cyber security and some of the buzzwords that they’re using so you’re you’re building your east to west networks networking and and the north south were are north south influencing so trying to influence those above and below um What are some of the other things? So, wait, a lot of networking, a lot of challenges with it, lots of large-scale challenges. What’s the thing that drives you the most crazy about networking? What’s the part of networking that you just go, you know, like, just in general for support and maintenance for me, as soon as I hear it’s the printer, I’m just like, oh, God. No. No. Printer. What? What hits you like that inside of networking?
Speaker 1 | 25:57.138
It’s when the customer tells you the solution. Hey, can you guys reset the web server? Yeah, we can, but what’s going on, right? You’ve already told me how to fix the problem. How come you didn’t fix it? That’s what you think in your head, right? It’s about getting to the customer and asking, making them say, what are you experiencing? Don’t tell me the solution. Because most of the time, the solution is not the right way. And if you follow that, the solution the customer gives you, you’ve just spent an hour and the solution, the problem is still there. So that’s probably the big one. The second one is blinding the network. You know, let’s make some fact-based decisions here. And again, tell me the problem. You’re telling me the network’s broke. Why do you think the network’s broke?
Speaker 0 | 26:49.007
And don’t you love it when it’s like… They’re calling you on their VoIP phone and saying, hey, the network’s down here. We can’t get to anything.
Speaker 1 | 26:58.461
Or sending the email from their computer.
Speaker 0 | 27:03.065
But you emailed me and you’re calling me and the network’s down completely.
Speaker 1 | 27:10.011
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 27:11.692
Wait a minute. You guys can’t see me scratching my head and making my face. But, oh, man, yeah. And so. You know, the being told the solution, that’s something that I learned early on and I’ve always pushed other people for is it’s not being told the solution, but recognizing that that people come to us with the solution or with the solution that they’re aware of because they’ve got that hammer. They see that nail. That’s that’s the fix. And so I always try to teach my guys, you know, ask why or what’s the goal? What are we? trying to accomplish here, don’t just say, oh, okay, I can reset the server and run off and do it. Right. Find out why.
Speaker 1 | 28:02.826
I agree.
Speaker 0 | 28:06.148
All right. So what do you love about networking?
Speaker 1 | 28:12.892
You know, I always relate networking to classes. in school. I consider networking math. It’s either, it’s pretty unintended, it’s binary. It’s either, it’s on or it’s off, right? Where I consider the server team, the systems teams, like English. There’s many ways of doing it. It just depends how you want to do it, right? So I’m a big math guy. I love math. And it’s just… Yeah, it’s going to come up with an answer there.
Speaker 0 | 28:53.502
Yeah, it’s algebra versus differential equations.
Speaker 1 | 29:01.128
Yeah. How much do you love math? You know, in making enterprise solutions, making things communicate, making the business operate from something that you did, designed, you know, built with other other team members i mean i think that’s a that says a lot it’s out it’s always a good time when um you’re standing up a new site whether it’s a hotel or a store and things are working as expected it’s
Speaker 0 | 29:35.239
like yeah we did that yeah done okay you can start your service good luck that’s right all right so um dollar general and then where
Speaker 1 | 29:52.362
Dollar General, and then I went to a manufacturer. So I went to Arista Networks. They have a great product. They provide a lot of visibility from the network stack perspective. You know, I think a lot of it comes from, one, the visibility they provide, but two, the support that they give in their products. And I started that. right at COVID. So, you know, selling things during COVID was a tough time.
Speaker 0 | 30:28.324
Yeah. Yeah. Because that whole world, I mean, yes, you have the cold calls and yes, you have video calls kind of like we’re doing. And of course that like ramped up. So tell me a little more about that. What was that experience like? And what were the new challenges to that? Besides the fact that you couldn’t go see anybody and buy them a cup of coffee or lunch or… Because I’m assuming you weren’t really doing that kind of sales, were you?
Speaker 1 | 30:57.112
I was a sales engineer. So, yeah, we would go book, go buy copy, do demos. It was just tough to get in front of customers at the time. But I felt the product was such a great product. I wanted to evangelize that to everybody, right? Hey, here’s a great networking product. It’s better than everybody else. Let’s put it in and provide great networking. I know it sounds sort of cliche, but…
Speaker 0 | 31:35.509
No, it’s fine. I mean, that’s one of those lessons that I learned over time was that, you know, as I was growing up, I… swore to myself i’m never going to do sales i’m never going to do sales and then i’m waiting tables and i’m starting to bartend and and it just hits me one day and i’m like oh crap everything’s sales yeah that’s right because especially you know bartending and waiting tables they’re like well what do you recommend and and or the chef wants us to push a certain plate or one of those and but but where i was headed with all of that was that When I really believed in one of the plates or I really liked one of the plates, it was so easy to sell that because I could tell them what I liked about it. And I could tell them why it was good and I could tell them those kinds of things. And that’s kind of when that light bulb clicked for me was that I recognized, oh, when I believe in the product, whether it’s fish or steak, it’s easy to sell. So if you believed in the network products, obviously, you know, you are. You obviously believed in networking.
Speaker 1 | 32:49.055
That’s right. The tough part about that too, and I’ll put an analogy to food, right? Like, hey, Mike, you got to try this dish. It’s amazing, right? It’s the best dish you’ll ever try. Sometimes you hype it up so much that when somebody was to taste that dish, like, yeah, it’s just okay, right? See, there’s a fine line of making sure you’re hyping it up enough, but showing the value in that product.
Speaker 0 | 33:23.345
Okay. So you’re trying to do that during the beginning of COVID. And I noticed that fairly quick in there, there’s another change.
Speaker 1 | 33:32.673
Yeah. Just based on the slowness with COVID, right, I had an opportunity to join CPI Card Group. And if you have a credit card in your wallet, it probably came from CPI Card Group. They produce credit cards. And it is amazing the technology it takes to put the credit card together, that small little piece of plastic in your pocket. And at that location, you talk about network downtime. Yeah, it was not a good day when the network went down because all manufacturing stops.
Speaker 0 | 34:13.608
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 34:14.649
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 34:16.126
And so with this one, was it anywhere near the level of complexity for networking or just now the criticality of the network became so much more? I hate to say it this way, but if half of a hallway of hotel rooms goes down, that’s one thing. It’s not that big of a deal compared to the networking going down to the machine that’s… handling the stamping of every individual card. Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 34:49.542
It was the criticality. And they did need some help, obviously, on the network side, but they needed some leadership on the network side also. So I had the opportunity when I was there to hire two great engineers. And when I hired those engineers, and I forget what book I read that I got this saying, I told them, I said, I’m hiring you to tell me what to do, not for me to tell you what to do. Right. And that allows those engineers to grow because I’m not directing them what to do. I can do that. Like I can tell you what product to put in, how to configure it. But I want you to tell me what’s the best play. Is that the right product? Is that the right configuration? What are we going to put in to make sure uptime of the network is stable? Based on my past experience, I can tell you, but that’s not my role anymore. My role is to ensure that we’re putting the right products in, but you tell me how we’re going to do it. There’s a little bit of back and forth with that. Right. But, and by giving that ability, and I say ability, giving that, telling that to the people that work for me, it gives them a sense of pride. It gives them a sense of ownership in what they’re doing.
Speaker 0 | 36:13.076
Okay.
Speaker 1 | 36:17.217
And you seem to get… better production and better outcome out of people.
Speaker 0 | 36:23.902
Yeah. So this is more around that leading of the team. And even if it’s a small team, but it’s that you help build them up so that they are enabled to and they believe in themselves and they believe in the solutions that they bring. Okay. And so you were there for a little while and finally into the position that you’re in today.
Speaker 1 | 36:50.335
Yeah. I’m at Specialty Dental Brands. And, you know, we partner with specialty dental organizations, hence the name Specialty Dental Brands, and we provide HR, finance, and IT support to them.
Speaker 0 | 37:06.540
Okay. So it’s almost like a VAR, but it’s a VAR within three. very limited or a very limited scope of services provided, but only for a very specific networking or not networking, but a very specific industry.
Speaker 1 | 37:27.038
That’s right. Yeah. It is amazing how unique dental is. This is my first healthcare position. And I don’t know, it seems like dental from a technology standpoint, it’s like 10 to 15 years behind.
Speaker 0 | 37:41.765
um just technology itself i laugh because i keep hearing that about transportation too and you know as one of the largest organizations that i’m providing support for um truckers they’re 10 to 15 i think it’s just a generic term like like when the construction company tells you they’ll be done in two weeks yeah and what i really liked about coming over to especially dental was um
Speaker 1 | 38:12.233
I’m going to say it’s a startup. We’re getting out of the startup mode, but it’s an opportunity to help build an organization from the ground up. You don’t have that opportunity when I was at Dollar General. That was a train that was moving down the tracks and there was no stopping it. And it was very hard to move. But in this organization, being small, and I’ll use the term agile, we’re able to build it up any way we want. So it was sort of a blank slate. Like, how are we going to build up the network? How are we going to build up the systems? How are we going to get visibility? How are we going to support the practices with those IT needs? So I took on the challenge to help with that.
Speaker 0 | 39:00.357
So what are some of the other challenges or what are the unique challenges that you’re running into within this? I mean, you’ve got, you obviously have some HIPAA compliance that you got to deal with. You’ve got, now you’re also dealing with multiple. different clients and different business lines who may even be direct competitors with each other who are still using your services how do you help them feel secure in in let them letting you have information that that they may not want your
Speaker 1 | 39:27.786
next appointment to have right um the biggest challenge is making them understand that their part is something bigger i mean so that they’ve they’ve been an individual practice for years right But now that you’re part of specialty dental brands, you have a large enterprise support behind you. right? They don’t, the practices don’t understand that the guy next door is also part of specialty dental potentially, right? They all think they’re unicorns and that’s not a bad thing, but they’re just not used to that, that enterprise level.
Speaker 0 | 40:08.184
Okay. And so, you know, wave me off if I’m getting into too much of this, but when it comes to you. All of the different unicorns. How many different unicorns are you guys dealing with? 252. 200. Wow. Okay. So 252 unique networks, unique financial packages, or not unique packages, but unique ways of looking at their business, or at least they believe so. And trying to. Trying to juggle that. So, okay, how do you keep track of that? You’ve got 250 separate networks you’re supporting, and financial and HR packages that you’re supporting for these groups. There’s got to be a couple of things that are challenging in that and trying to help keep them separate so that you don’t walk in and go, hey, Dave, oh, wait, you’re Paul. I’m sorry.
Speaker 1 | 41:13.910
You know, the biggest challenge is, and the number one challenge, the number one objective is to standardize. You really can’t support 250 unicorns, right? So getting them standardized and making sure they understand that from an IT perspective, that you don’t need to call your local IT anymore because we’re responsible and accountable for you. from a HIPAA, from a PCI perspective. So please call us. We will help you. If we’re not helping you, we’ll fix that. Because they always want to go back to their local IT. Because their local IT, they know them by a first-name basis. They appreciate them.
Speaker 0 | 42:02.155
And typically, there’s one throat that they can reach out and grab and say, come here.
Speaker 1 | 42:05.736
That’s right. Yeah. But we’re there to do that also. So when I got here, I was able to hire seven people to help. We had the growth of the business itself and all the challenges we have with each unicorn. We had to bring people on to support them, to be able to support them. Everyone I hired, I told them that story. I hired you to tell me what to do. And a lot of people are coming up with a lot of great ideas to support these practices.
Speaker 0 | 42:47.328
How large of a geographical area are you supporting these 250 over?
Speaker 1 | 42:52.010
Yeah, we’re in 25 states right now.
Speaker 0 | 42:55.052
Okay, so that’s a bit of a challenge too. Local support in any of these 25 states? Or are you back into a control tower again?
Speaker 1 | 43:04.938
No, we do have some diverse people. We have some people in Utah, some people in Colorado that work directly for specialty dental brands. But even in those markets, we still need hands on the ground, boots on the ground to help if they have to replace a server, put a new firewall in.
Speaker 0 | 43:26.086
So when somebody joins and they’ve been using the local IT group and everything and they’ve got all of these. One-off solutions. Are you guys kind of coming in and ripping and replacing and setting them up? Or are you slowly converting them over time and saying, okay, we’re going to start with the firewall so that we can help manage your network and make sure that you’re secured? What’s kind of the approach in those different types of solutions?
Speaker 1 | 43:53.916
Yeah, going forward, all new practices right out of the gate within the first 60 days. We’ll be getting a new network stack. And then any… any outdated compute, they will also get repressions for that.
Speaker 0 | 44:10.379
Okay. You got any of them in New Mexico?
Speaker 1 | 44:16.185
Not yet. Not yet.
Speaker 0 | 44:18.227
Okay. I was just thinking of the guy that I go to and I was just wondering, hmm, I wonder if he’s one of them.
Speaker 1 | 44:23.251
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 44:26.414
All right. So obviously you spent a lot of time. doing the networking stuff, the experience in the military, the Air Force helped teach you some of the leadership qualities. You had a couple of mentors. Were there any other mentors that really stick out that you want to say thank you to for the things that you learned from them? And you know what? Sometimes mentors are the people who teach you what not to do too. And you may not want to give them by name,
Speaker 1 | 44:54.949
but
Speaker 0 | 44:55.906
And so you got anybody like that? Somebody that taught you what not to do because it just irked you so much?
Speaker 1 | 45:04.092
Yeah. You know, this guy’s a real nerd. Chris Beagle. He was during my Gaylord days also. And then Scott Wood at the CPI Card Group really helped elevate a lot of the leadership, you know, coming from a network. person into a leadership role, getting out of being an individual contributor and allowing others to do what you know. How do I, as a leader, coming back from a technical perspective, how do I help others know and understand what I know so they can be better in their job? And it allows me to get out of that technical role more into the business side, doing budgets. contractor or consultant relationships, you know, building those up.
Speaker 0 | 46:03.837
So, all right. That’s, that’s, I think that’s one of the core pieces that we don’t talk about that much because it is, it’s such a shift from being the geek or the nerd and doing all of the technical things, starting to learn not just the business that you happen to be in at the moment, but business in general and recognizing the all of those things that you just mentioned of getting out of the technical learning the financial piece of it learning how to work with the contractors learning how to work with I’m trying to think of all of the things that you just said who helped teach you that or was it stuff that did you’re one of those people who can sit learn or sit listen and watch and then learn and then start trying to start trying to say, Hey, let me do, let me handle the next one.
Speaker 1 | 47:00.788
Yeah. Two people. So Rob, I’ve mentioned Rob Massey earlier and Scott Wood. Those were two, two people that helped me understand the relationship side of the business. So,
Speaker 0 | 47:14.861
okay. And so I think that’s one of those key things that as we start to learn that and if we’ve got any head for it or interested in, that’s one of the other things that helps set us up for success in becoming a leader or manager over the IT group. And trying to think of more things. So let’s take a completely different tack than your history at work. What’s your… What’s your geek history or nerd card at home? What do you like to do that way? Or do you just unplug when you get home and go out and enjoy the woods in Nashville or the fishing or the boating? What do you like to do when you’re not at the office?
Speaker 1 | 48:05.122
Yeah, I’m a gamer, so I game. I’ve been playing a lot of Tarkov, a lot of Call of Duty. And then I do disconnect from, you know. Anything compute-wise, I’m currently building a house. So just the relaxing while you’re swinging a hammer, actually building the house. I built a 30 by 50 barn. It took me longer than I hoped it would, but that piece was very relaxing. Whether it was negative 14 outside or 90 degrees. I don’t know. There’s something about doing something non-IT-wise. It didn’t seem like a job, right? It was just out there designing and constructing and building the barn.
Speaker 0 | 48:50.583
And negative 14, where were you that was negative 14? Because Nashville doesn’t get to negative 14.
Speaker 1 | 49:00.389
It did last year. We had a couple of cold days that I went out there and I was all bundled up. And obviously the southern natives thought I was crazy. But I still had all my cold weather gear. So you can always dress up for it.
Speaker 0 | 49:13.778
layers that’s right all right so you you do unplug every once in a while um what’s you told me a couple of the games what was technology as you were waking up as a teenager where where was it at that point because like you know for me i remember standing in line at a local grocery store to be able to put quarters in asteroids because it was the first video game like you know, arcade game in the city. So that, that kind of ages me, you know, I know what it means to dial a phone.
Speaker 1 | 49:52.747
Yeah, that’s right. So we had Radio Shacks where we were at. So they sold the Tandy product. We had a Tandy 1000 EX. Had a floppy drive. My mom didn’t know any games to buy or anything. So she just bought the computer and the monitor. So it was learning basic. Like, what can I do on this thing? I think the first game we played was Rogue. Again, just an arrow game with monsters. If you want to call a monster, they’re just letters, right? That you run into walking through the maze.
Speaker 0 | 50:24.649
Uh-huh. Kind of like the Ataris.
Speaker 1 | 50:27.682
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. So, yeah, just the Tandy 1000. I think I built a program to pick lottery numbers, right? Like, hey, pick the first number and then pick the second number. If the second number matched the first number, pick another number.
Speaker 0 | 50:44.709
Okay. What about tomorrow? What are you looking forward to in technology? Or what do you think? What do you future cast for us coming?
Speaker 1 | 50:58.834
Oh, gosh. You know, I think I’ve been thinking more retirement recently than what’s the technology.
Speaker 0 | 51:04.118
There’s not even any gray on that head, man.
Speaker 1 | 51:07.300
I know. I know. I have three three granddaughters. I thought about this the other day. You know, I’m hoping one day there’s a car as a service. I don’t want to buy a car. I want cars as a service. So as long as as long as you can, I can hit the button on the on the phone. And within 15 minutes, I have a car or a truck, whatever I want. But it’s just cars, you know, I’ll just pay a monthly fee and have it as a service. I don’t want to own it. I’m looking forward to that day.
Speaker 0 | 51:38.718
And why aren’t you starting that financial model and seeing what you can do with it?
Speaker 1 | 51:43.523
I should. Yeah. No, I should do that. It’s a great, I don’t know. It’s one of those things. I just, I’m waiting for somebody to do it, but you’re right. Maybe I should do it.
Speaker 0 | 51:54.773
Yeah. Take advantage of it, man. Run while you can. So this last week, I was out at an executive technology summit, and the topic was AI, and the topic was AI, and the topic was AI. So I’m interested. With chat GPT being out there and the concerns that we have about that, and, well, concerns or the excitement, depending on how you’re looking at it, how do you see AI playing in the world that you’re working in today? Or do you see it having a role there? Because I can name four or five different ways that we could leverage it within my industries, but I’m wondering what it looks like for yours. Yeah,
Speaker 1 | 52:46.929
I mean, I think from a using… marketing, AI for marketing. I think that’s something we could be doing. I don’t believe we’re doing it today, but obviously getting customers in the chair for their procedure, whatever it is, that’s our goal. How do we get more customers in the chair so these doctors can be good at what they’re doing and that’s providing service to the patients. The financial piece, I know we have a data team that does great things. I believe they’re using some AI for the financial side of it.
Speaker 0 | 53:36.039
So financially in reporting, financially in analysis, financially in who are the best, what’s the best demographic to market towards and try to get them to do more dental work or what?
Speaker 1 | 53:49.048
Yeah, you know, I’m not sure what they’re doing. Specifically, I just know that they have a lot of data there and they’re crunching numbers all the time. So I haven’t had an opportunity to find out exactly. But those are some great, that’d be great outcomes, right?
Speaker 0 | 54:07.518
Yeah, potentially. As long as you’re not marketing to me,
Speaker 1 | 54:10.899
telling me I need more dental work. We need you to get you to the peds practice. Yeah, that would be bad. It’d be a bad day.
Speaker 0 | 54:19.121
Yeah. What is the technology that’s out there today that most excites you or that you wish you had the newest version of?
Speaker 1 | 54:32.843
I’m a big advocate for automation for Python. I love the Python programming language. To me, it makes it easy. I didn’t like programming growing up other than that lottery game I made when I was a kid. But as I’m getting older, it’s like, why do we want to… take a switch, a router, a server out of the box every time and hand jam it. I call it hand jamming it, right? So let’s use Terraform, Ansible, Python to help automate that, right? Whether that’s initial configuration or auditing of those products. I mean, that’s the piece I always tell my team. If you can do something manually in 10 hours and it may take you 12 to automate it, let’s automate it because you know we’re going to do it again. at some point.
Speaker 0 | 55:27.593
Yeah. So, okay. That brings up an aspect of our conversation that I completely bypassed and didn’t even bring up SD-WAN. So it sounds like your teams really haven’t embraced SD-WAN along the way. And it’s been more of that manual build and construct versus some of the SD-WAN stuff where you get something out of the box. And as long as you do the basic configuration so it can join the network and then it just suddenly receives the base configuration, even if it is 25 states away from you, you know, so have you played with SD-WAN? How much do you know about it?
Speaker 1 | 56:10.021
Yeah, no, we do. We do have SD-WAN. You know, the big push that we’re doing right now is zero touch provisioning. So getting that laptop to the customer, to the end user, getting that. firewall shipped directly to the site. We don’t want to ship it to our warehouse to get pre-provisioned. We want to ship it direct to the site. Anybody can plug it in, right? Like plug in the power cable, plug in the WAN cable, and it will get its configuration. And I think one nice thing about our model is we don’t, there’s no need for us to connect every one of our practices together. So that way, if there is a compromise, right, it’s isolated to the one practice. That’s sort of the thought. From a management perspective, we do want the ability to reach them remotely through SD-WAN, not over the internet, through the tunnel that SD-WAN provides. So, yeah, that’s the zero-touch piece and the SD-WAN, at least from a security perspective. Let’s use SD-WAN to bring everything back to a central firewall. So we can inspect it to go outbound. Instead of deploying that at 250 sites, we only have to deploy at one site.
Speaker 0 | 57:30.914
Okay. If you were going to try to use AI outside of the network or outside of who you’re working for now, and you had the chance to just go play with it, what would you try to do? And I ask you this without even having thought of that answer myself.
Speaker 1 | 57:52.886
Right. You know, I’ve dabbled with it a little bit, you know, just to see, you know, chat GPT and BARD. You know, what can it do for us? Obviously, from a programming piece, it seems to make it easy. You know, the first initial thought was like, well, this is just doing what Google is doing, right? But it does it better. It provides that data. up front and gives you reasons why with the button to cut and paste, right? So you can use it. You know, I haven’t thought about what else we could use it for. I think that’s probably one aspect that I struggle with is that how do we take data and make those business decisions? Like what data can I put together to make that decision? So that’s one thing I’m working on. I’m not using A&S All for that. All right. I look at our data teams and I’m like, man, you guys are just awesome when it comes to taking data and forming it into a spot that a business person can make decisions with it.
Speaker 0 | 59:02.629
Yeah. Well, those guys, they’re definitely in the center of the storm right now. I mean, everything is data. So much of, well, I mean, we’re gathering everywhere we can. and sensors every place and just harvesting that data. And then they get to put it into a form that hopefully we can ingest it and turn it into some kind of knowledge that we can then someday turn into wisdom with some experience around it. But, you know, all of the fun that goes around that. So. You got anything you want to promote? You got any, any personal projects? You got any, anybody you want to give a shout out to? You got, this is, this is your chance for the, you you’re in the military. You’ve had to have heard this term that I love me. Now’s your chance.
Speaker 1 | 59:56.159
Yeah. Uh, you know, I, I always promote this book. Whoever I talk to, it’s, it’s one book. I’ve, I’ve listened to it multiple times. Uh, a friend of mine, Jeff Hodges has recommended it to me. Um, and I recommend it to everybody. I wish I, I wish I had the opportunity to listen to this book when I was 20. Um, and it’s, uh, never split the difference by Chris boss.
Speaker 0 | 60:17.892
Never split the difference.
Speaker 1 | 60:20.233
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 60:21.413
Okay. Never split the difference by Chris boss. That’s actually one I haven’t heard of yet. So writing it down. Old school tech.
Speaker 1 | 60:28.624
That’s right. I recommend everybody. I listen to books on Audible. So it does take some practice. And once you listen to the book, you understand what I’m talking about. But understanding, I mean, he’s a, he takes what he learned in international hostage negotiation and applies it to business. So yeah, it’s amazing.
Speaker 0 | 60:55.620
Wow. Okay. Now that definitely adds some curiosity and piques the interest. And you know what? In all honesty, I am a huge Audible. They’ve got a special going on and it ends today. And last night I was like looking through it and I was like, oh yeah, I remember that author. I used to read him as a kid. And I bought like nine books last night.
Speaker 1 | 61:20.653
Nice.
Speaker 0 | 61:22.774
My library is 400 plus. So, yeah, and constantly, you know, it’s just nice to be able to listen to something and get my head somewhere else while just driving, you know. And it’s like for me, it’s almost like listening to music. But what I hate is when I realize that my brain is just full, full on thinking about something else and the chapter is playing. And I’m like, oh, crap, man, that was 30 minutes that I have no idea what what was just read.
Speaker 1 | 61:52.667
That’s right.
Speaker 0 | 61:55.228
All right. Well, John, this has been an awesome conversation. Thank you very much for joining us on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds.
Speaker 1 | 62:03.534
Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it.
Speaker 0 | 62:05.856
Yeah. Really appreciate you. And I hope you have a wonderful weekend, sir. Thank you.
