Speaker 0 | 00:09.199

Welcome, everyone, back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds today, talking with Craig Hatmaker, is that right?

Speaker 1 | 00:14.322

That’s correct.

Speaker 0 | 00:15.202

Yes, the younger, the younger of the ones, somehow. Are those, is that an encyclopedia set in the background?

Speaker 1 | 00:23.566

National Geographics.

Speaker 0 | 00:25.467

Oh, yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 00:26.727

Nat Geos.

Speaker 0 | 00:28.660

So when we moved my father out of his old house in Princeton, Massachusetts, you know, where the pilgrims came and all that stuff, he had some crazy, crazy Oreo. Wait, no, you mean not in Princeton.

Speaker 1 | 00:46.807

First of all, we visited my daughter in Maine, and then we just kind of migrated on down the East Coast, went through all of the New England states. And also, we just got back last night. So to make sure that I could be here in time for this event.

Speaker 0 | 01:02.988

That’s how important I am. This is you are.

Speaker 1 | 01:05.270

You are that important. You are the most important person in the world right now.

Speaker 0 | 01:08.792

We’re in Maine. We’re in Mainery, my favorite state.

Speaker 1 | 01:12.215

Brunswick and Port, which is just a little bit north of Portland.

Speaker 0 | 01:15.437

OK, great. I lived in Kennebunkport for a year.

Speaker 1 | 01:19.400

We went past it many times.

Speaker 0 | 01:21.221

And yeah, that’s how I tore this shoulder. that I’m milking right now was surfing two weeks and four days of no sleep ago in yeah, in Maine. Cause this is, this is like the, this is the surfing season. So there’s supposed to be 20 foot waves on Saturday and I’m going to be very depressed that I’m not surfing in those because I wanted to surf five foot waves and go for four hours, turn my shoulder. This is an IT show, believe it or not. We did mention the cloud so far. Oh, National Geographic. Like I said, I haven’t quite gotten caffeinated enough yet. So we are going to introduce you here in a second. We’re just, we do the, we call it, maybe we call this a soft start. The National Geographic, and my dad, he had so many National Geographic. And when he moved out of the house, I mean, it’s a shame. Well, no, they probably got, I think they probably got sold in the… auction or something like that because he had so much stuff that had to go to the auction but i mean there were some really old national geographics like the kind of older thicker ones that were more white not yellow and i don’t know if that was just from time that was just from time yellowing they definitely didn’t have the yellow the leather you know cases you know these ones were so old and frayed and you’d look back and you’re like ah the the earth didn’t work like that back then because science thought differently

Speaker 1 | 02:52.276

Yeah, this is all kind of like recent history, but nobody ever uses them anymore. If you want to know what was published, you go to the Internet. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 02:59.962

that’s why I asked, like, you know, is that Britannica in 1988?

Speaker 1 | 03:03.905

It was the Internet back then. Yeah, you could.

Speaker 0 | 03:06.468

Yeah, I remember a big argument with my dad. And he was like, no, the woolly mammoth was not this and blah, blah, blah. Because my dad’s a doctor. So he’s the smartest man in the room. If you argue with the doctor, forget about it. Forget you are wrong. Even if he’s wrong, you are wrong. So I had to go to Encyclopedia Britannica and look up. I can’t remember what it was about the woolly mountain. I was like, look here, look here. See, it’s right here versus Google now or whatever it was. And I’d probably be, you’d have to fact check that three times with some other thing. Anyways. Yeah. The encyclopedia was, it was back in the day. So please, please tell me about the connection and, and a, what let’s. just introduce yourself and we’ll go from there.

Speaker 1 | 03:54.223

Okay. So my name is Craig Hatmaker. I am retired. I am a former CIO.

Speaker 0 | 03:59.887

First of all, congratulations on retirement.

Speaker 1 | 04:02.429

Oh yeah.

Speaker 0 | 04:02.830

It’s a whole group of questions there. Go ahead. Former CIO. This is great. Keep going.

Speaker 1 | 04:10.396

So I’ve worked for some very large companies. You may have heard of them, you know, like Canon. And I’ve worked for some small companies. My most recent recently, I semi-retired to work for the town of Christiansburg. So that was where I spent the last three and a half years or almost four years of my working life.

Speaker 0 | 04:33.715

How big is the town?

Speaker 1 | 04:35.676

It’s 14 square miles, 17 square miles. It’s not very big at all.

Speaker 0 | 04:42.222

So it’s,

Speaker 1 | 04:44.363

I think, 26,000. So it qualifies as a small city. Oh, but. It’s still keeps its very, very small town feel. I had done local government before. So this was kind of who hires at the time I was hired. I was 63. Who hires a 63 year old?

Speaker 0 | 05:05.444

of the town of uh christiansburg christiansburg or like where i grew up the town of princeton which was we had 1400 households so i think i don’t know what that population is 3000 so it’s not as you know it’s not as small as some as south dakota but um it’s you know it’s there i did live in virginia too by uh for for four years also which part i lived in like uh you know percival though so it doesn’t really count as like virginia that’s like dc more so northern okay yeah it was outside of leesburg it like bordered leesburg so okay well town christiansburg’s in southwest virginia in the mountains right but real real virginia i mean i was near west virginia i drove into west virginia a couple times that was interesting to buy a van in the middle i mean it was down in this valley in the middle of nowhere and i was like if something happens to me here it doesn’t matter no one’s finding me

Speaker 1 | 06:01.900

um keep going well so one of the things that uh um before we turned on the recorder i mentioned that we are actually doing it right now this is um the soft landing as you called it this uh introduction where we get to know each other yes uh absolutely critical uh that we first of all if you’re an it leader and you don’t establish relationships oh man you’re not going anywhere i think your uh tagline is on your on your uh LinkedIn profile somewhere. It said something about if you’re not speaking business, then you’re going to hit a hard wall as a CIO.

Speaker 0 | 06:38.348

Let’s see. Yeah. Let’s see what I write. Cause I changed, cause I get paranoid and I’m like, I get paranoid. I’m like, well, people really read this. I’m trying to every week. I’m like, well, people are reading like, let’s see. Yes. If you can’t communicate with CEOs and business owners in a way that they understand and that matters to them, your influence and career as an IT professional will eventually slam into a brick wall.

Speaker 1 | 06:58.364

yes before we can even keep the blinky lights on but yeah go ahead so before we can even talk to somebody we got to know who they are and so uh i had before we turned on the recorder i mentioned that i knew you had eight kids and uh you

Speaker 0 | 07:13.392

have my uh admiration and can and no one’s suicidal amazing i’m still here alive you’re actually a hologram of me that’s really just a repeat of

Speaker 1 | 07:26.580

made up on chat gpt or something i am trying to clone myself keep going well i’ve got three kids they’re all grown uh as i mentioned i went to go visit one of them in maine uh and i i have another kid that’s in uh manchester uk and uh another son that’s out there in pasadena california so they’re all over the place it gives us an opportunity to go travel which is you One of the reasons why I’m retired. So we can go visit our kids all over the world.

Speaker 0 | 07:59.285

I haven’t been to Pasadena. My aunt lives there. I should go there.

Speaker 1 | 08:02.607

The little old lady from Pasadena?

Speaker 0 | 08:04.568

Yeah, I guess so. She was like one of the first yoga instructors in the United States. I remember as a kid, there was these VHS tapes. What’s move gently move mountains? You know, I was like, she really was like one of the very first like pioneers of some kind of like. like crazy, you know, yoga on tape type of thing. We’re like, what is yoga? You know, it was unheard of back then. I like going back in time. That’s, and it’s just so much fun to talk about technology back then. Keep going. I don’t want to, I don’t want to take you off.

Speaker 1 | 08:38.840

Okay. So I, so leading into this, I would like to ask you a couple of questions. So tell me about your journey from creative writing to voice over IP.

Speaker 0 | 08:48.943

Such a great question. I love that you’re doing this. I should just do this from now on. Look, we’re not doing this today. You’re interviewing me. I’m not interviewing you. You’re retired. You sound really, really, this would be a lot of fun too. We need more hosts, by the way. You want to be a host? Okay, so here’s my journey. I’m going to just be real blunt with everybody here. This is going to be, I started off pre-med because when you grow up in a family of doctors and you don’t become a doctor, you’re a loser. So everyone in my family is like a doctor. My grandfather’s a pediatrician. My dad’s a urologist. My uncle was an ophthalmologist. My sister’s an RN. Her husband’s an anesthesiologist. So I went pre-med, but I’m a very stubborn kind of like, I don’t know, just wanted to like kind of break free type of person, you know, maybe like a lot of kids, you know, maybe I was, I was a bad, I was probably like a really a bad like kid once I hit like 17, 18. I was probably very, I gave my. May my parents forgive me. So, anywho, I did go pre-med, and I was… taking inorganic chemistry and biology and all this stuff. And I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t in it like passionate. I was just, I realized I was doing it just, you know, just because to either make money, to have a job, because if you don’t have a job when you grow up, then, you know, you don’t go to college, you don’t do this, you know, like the typical, like these, these frameworks that were meant that we’re told we have to live in. And I think back then I was like, you know, you know, what’s this rat race. And, you know, the, concrete jungle and listening to Bob Marley like no man this isn’t right you know I’m gonna live in a in a trailer on Hawaii and surf and you know I’m never gonna get married and fall into this typical like you know whatever it was yeah and uh so I was like I dropped out I dropped out of med school and I went uh I went I really liked reading I really liked um I really liked English back then I liked uh you know I can remember oh man what was it I remember just, you know, whatever Canterbury Tales, you’re having to read old English. We had to read old English and like the real old, like I wish, I wish get a wish get a, you know, like one of the old English stuff. So anyways, that’s what I ended up in. And then I met some like femme fatale girl back then who screwed up my entire life and was like, no, this is, I was going to St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, Manchester, New Hampshire, the other Manchester.

Speaker 1 | 11:24.059

The other Manchester,

Speaker 0 | 11:24.880

yes. And so I followed some girl out to CSU, Colorado State University, transferred there, went from a small liberal arts, I mean, a small school to like a really huge, massive school. That relationship failed miserably, didn’t work out. I was completely depressed. And now I was stuck in Colorado. Then, for whatever reason, I still had that you can’t be a loser in the back of your head. So six years later, I graduated, like a six-year college degree, two years. So I graduated with a creative writing degree, took my very first job. And at the time, I ended up getting married. I found my wife that I’ve been married to for a long time. May the Lord above bless her. I ended up getting married and doing the right thing in college is a whole nother long story. There’s a really long story there. And but to try and try and close the loop here, I took the very first job I could take out of college because I had to provide. I feel like, you know, I have to provide for a wife and family, you know, that eventually I’m going to have or they said I was thinking about. So I took the job at Fazoli’s. And one thing about me, everything that I have, it’s a it’s a blessing. Everything that I’ve ever said. I will never do happens to me. So if you ever look down, if you ever look down upon anybody for anything, anything, it’s going to happen to you. At least it does in my life, right? Like I will never work in a fast food joint. You know what I mean? My first job, my first job out of college, the very first job out of college was wearing a headset at a fast casual. We called it, no, no, fast casual. We called it fast casual because you could. Because you had to bring breadsticks to the table at a place called Fazoli’s, which was kind of well known back then. It was like, oh,

Speaker 1 | 13:14.688

yeah, I remember Fazoli’s.

Speaker 0 | 13:16.269

You know, it was like Italian. You know, it was great. You know, I think, do you want breadsticks with that? So instead of do you want fries with that? Do you want extra breadsticks with that? And I can I had the headset on. I was working the drive through. There I am with a college degree in creative writing. Anyways, then I moved up the world, moved up in the world to Starbucks. And there was I just I saw people walking in and out of the door. It’s. it’s all in the book, by the way, that’s coming out. This, this story is in the book. It takes a long time to get there, but long story short, I realized after working in a coffee shop that I knew how to talk to people, even though I was the guy in high school that was very shy and walked with his head down, you know, facing the floor and was like terrified of his own shadow. When you work in a coffee shop, you learn to be everyone’s local psychologist. You learn to talk to people. And I saw salespeople coming in and out that just, they weren’t like super intelligent. They weren’t, you know, they’re just like these dudes driving really nice cars. And I mean, I kind of was like, what do you do? And this guy’s like, oh, I’m in, you know, real estate broker or something. You know, I was like, okay. I was like, I can talk to people. So I put my resume up on monster.com and a Cisco startup called me. And the guy can never forget. The recruiter was like a real fast talker. So, you know, I saw your resume and I feel you’re a really good fit for this role and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, yeah, okay, awesome. Yeah, awesome. And he’s like, do you know what a voice over IP is? And I was like, huh?

Speaker 1 | 14:44.787

He’s like Same response you get from a modified TP 10 years ago. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 14:47.729

yeah. Don’t worry. They’ll train you. Don’t worry. They’ll train you. I’m like, okay. He’s like, have you heard of Cisco? I’m like, yeah, they deliver my paper products. No, no, no, no, no, no. Cisco is the I’m serious. This is the true. Don’t worry. They’ll train you. Here’s what I need you to do. You need to put on a suit. Do you have a suit and tie? I’m like, uh, I got one. He’s make sure it’s like, you know, like go buy a new one or something like that. He’s like, here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re going to come to this office. You’re going to go down here. You’re going to come and you’re going to meet with this guy named Jonas Fruget. He’s a real, uh, look, you need to be this. You need to be that you need to log, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just like, I just did whatever this recruiter told me to do. And I got the job. And, but the funny thing is he’s like, I’m going to tag Jonas in this because one of my first bosses. So Jonas, he had two Blackberries. It was like out of a movie. And back then, Blackberries had just come out. I mean, it was like email on your phone.

Speaker 1 | 15:43.349

And a full keyboard, sort of.

Speaker 0 | 15:44.550

This is crazy. So we got, you know. I go and I see this, I do the ride along, whatever it is, multiple interviews, ride alongs with people. And then you got to go in, this is the recruiter’s coaching. And now you’re going to go in and talk and look, here’s what he’s going to do. He’s going to be, he’s going to act very uninterested in you. He’s going to act, you know, blah, blah, blah, this. He’s going to say this. He’s like, and after he asked you how the day was and everything, he’s going to say, you know what? I don’t think this job is for you, Phil. This is a recruiter. He’s telling me that this is what’s going to happen. And I’m like, okay. He’s like, and like at that point, that’s when you got to be like, absolutely not. And you have to close for the job because that’s what they want you to do at this company. And I was like, okay. Absolutely exactly what happened. Exactly. I go, there’s this guy on two BlackBerrys. He’s talking on one BlackBerry. Yeah. Hey, da, da, da, da, da. He’s like, okay, cool, cool. Make sure you get everything in. Make sure you enter it into, what did they call? What did they say? They actually called the database SQL. Make sure you enter everything into SQL at the end of the day. then his phone’s ringing he’s on the other blackberry and he’s like okay all right john oh oh hey john yeah john oh really is that all it’s going to take to close the deal today and you know he’s like he’s like make sure you don’t come back without the deal click click he looks at me hangs up the phone’s like so how was the day um yeah it was great man it was awesome uh you know learned a lot blah blah blah blah blah yeah so um okay great you know ask me a few other questions you know what phil uh i don’t think this is the job for you i don’t think you know i don’t think you’re going to be a good singer I was like, I don’t know why you would think that. This is a perfect fit for me. I would come here and absolutely kill it. In fact, I think I should come in and start work on Monday. That’s exactly the attitude we want here. You’re hired. You know, it’s like something like that. It was just, it was wild. So anyways, I got into this crazy, fast-paced, small business, Cisco startup. We were selling. We had to consult. We had to sell basically dynamic T1s. I knew nothing. I had no clue what an IP address was. I didn’t know a router from a switch. When I found out that people were paying $500 a month for a T1, which I had no clue what that was, I was like, is it their phones? And then I was like, $500? What? That’s insane. You know, I was like, how am I going to do this? You know, and, and, but I had to provide for a family. And six months later, I was the… top i was the top guy in colorado and a year and a half later i was the number the only guido sirocco beat me by one deal at the end of the year because he was in california had a better territory that’s my excuse there you go um but yeah i learned a lot about technology i learned a lot about working with vendors i learned a lot working with local msps so i went from having no clue knowing what natting is or ip i learned it all live on the job which This whole story now that, I mean, if a lot, it comes up a lot on the show, I ask people like, you know, so you go to college, you get this degree in technology or you don’t get this degree in technology or whatever it is. Who do you really want running your it department or running the help desk or working on things or turning knobs and everything? Where did you really get your, where did you really get your experience and know what you’re doing and how you’re doing? No one’s going to like the top security guy. You can’t learn that in a, you can’t learn that in a classroom. So I don’t know. Does that answer your question?

Speaker 1 | 19:17.022

Yes, it does. And actually it leads into another question that I had, which was what is your architecture? And I can see, since you mentioned Cisco when I went to voice over IP, Cisco was who we used. We used two ASAs. We used an old Cisco picks router as our layer one, we use SIP trunking and we saved a ton of money by using voice over IP with SIP trunking.

Speaker 0 | 19:44.353

But we had to hire five guys to run it.

Speaker 1 | 19:46.895

Actually, no. That was a nice thing. It was easy to do.

Speaker 0 | 19:51.960

It was old PBX boxes, ASA. What were those, 500s or something? What were those? What was that? They had like a small business PBX that they came out with as well for a while back.

Speaker 1 | 20:01.622

Well, this was just using the VMs. We didn’t use their so we installed what is equivalent of a PBX, used Cisco’s VMs and installed that. So there was no the only hardware was the firewalls, the ASAs, and the layer one switch, which is the PIX, to make sure that we had diverse routing and instant failover and all these other things. But

Speaker 0 | 20:29.454

How were you doing the failover? Was it like a load balancing or something? I mean, because it was just a while ago or is this recent?

Speaker 1 | 20:35.796

So two, one was fairly recent a few years ago and the other one was about 10 years ago. The Cisco ASA solution was about 10 years ago. Failover, the ASAs were load balanced. We used our SIP trunking was LSI and they were load balanced so that when they’re…

Speaker 0 | 20:59.538

They had different routing and failover and they had disaster avoidance and you could repoint trunks or they would do that automatically on their end.

Speaker 1 | 21:08.341

We could literally unplug one ISP and the call would failover without being dropped to the other ISP. So it was all, it was magic. It was great. So I remember one of your guests was talking about, or I think it was one of your guests. I heard somebody saying that they had a hard time selling voice over IP because people were saying. Well, I don’t want to use this. I don’t want my phones going over your network because your network is always going down. Well, you got to solve that problem first before you even talk about moving things from the hot systems over to voice over IP. So what was your sales pitch when you went into somebody to sell to get them to move to a voice over IP? What was what was your elevator pitch?

Speaker 0 | 21:54.033

One, I hate the word pitch. I learned that a long time ago from Zig Ziglar talking about one of his other people. And the reason why I hate the word pitch is because pitch is like it’s something that you’re doing to someone. It’s something that is like you practice that you’re going to say to someone. Not that we don’t, you don’t practice like an initial benefit statement. Like I’ll never forget my initial benefit statement back then was IBS, right? You know, I help people streamline their voice and data services and become more competitive in the marketplace. But a pitch is like, yeah, you’re going to do something to someone. And I’m very much a believer in a consultative sale or a sitting on the same side of the table as the buyer and helping them make an informed decision and do something for them, helping them fill a need, fill a need that my, my, when I became a sales manager, my reps used to joke, call me fill the need. Um, but, um, yeah, so for me, it was about making friends. It was about. becoming a community mogul. It was, Hey, look, I, I know I spoke with Sharon upfront the other day. She told me you have, you know, six pots lines, a fax machine that you’ve got DSL and she’s resetting the router box by sticking a little pencil in the back. You don’t have any way to access files remotely. You’re not backing anything up because back then, you know, file backup was like a new thing. Right. you know, your website’s janky, whatever, you know? And so I know just from talking for her that I, that meeting with me is, is going to be a huge benefit to you. And no, no, no, get the hell out of here. Like no soliciting, whatever’s look, look, John, look, I understand. Like, uh, all I need is five minutes of your time. It sounded like it was out of wall street or something, you know, like, Oh look, all I need is five minutes of your time. And I promise you, if I don’t show you any benefit or I can’t help you out, I will kick myself to the curb. I’ll kick myself to the curb. And in worst case scenario, you know, I can refer some business your way in the future. And then I would always tell myself before I ever talk with anyone, it’s all about them. It’s all about them. It’s all about them first. And I think a lot of people have this idea or they have a negative perception of sales. And it’s typically people that, A, are afraid of themselves or afraid of sales, or they’re not good salespeople themselves, or they never learned from the right people. They didn’t have good mentors. But nothing gets done until someone makes a sale. This entire country was built on salespeople that move the industry, that move industry forward, right? Where I used to tell my, and then when I became a sales manager, I used to tell my people, look, your businesses are not good or bad out there, right? This is all this Zig Ziglar stuff. It’s only good or bad between your own two ears, right? Quit your stinking thinking, go out there and, and, and save the world, save this perceived dying economy. And, uh, I still have people call me this day. They’re like, Phil, you know. You really made a difference in my life when you told me like, go save the world. You know, don’t do this. I tell that to my guys today. So I don’t, I think. Being married, having kids, not being involved in the whole work hard, play hard mentality, which is like, you know, work hard during the day, go pitch a bunch of things and like, you know, and then go, you know, get wasted at night. You know, that whole, there’s that whole bottom 80% of the world is just, A, giving everyone else a bad name for it, screwing everything up, creating that mediocrity that we all know about in the vendor world. You know, it’s like just mediocrity is this disease of. whatever so it it was really more about asking questions and discovering and and first um um seeking to understand other people you know discover ask questions and connect discover respond basically that’s that’s a starbucks thing connect discover respond that’s a good good good motto i like it yeah yeah so i mean that’s it you know kind of like you said you need to know your people first just like walking down the hall or or whatever. And, and what you’re doing right now is really great because you’re revealing that I used to be, or kind of a hardcore salesperson at heart. And you know, that’s what you’re doing. And I would imagine that there’s a lot of friction between, or there could be friction between the IT department and, and sales, right? Cause sales are like a lot of times you have a lot of, you have a lot of arrogant salespeople in a company. If anyone’s working out there with salespeople, you’ve got the top sales rep. This guy could be a total arrogant. loser or like you know but he’s not a loser because he’s the number one guy that’s bringing in a ton of money for the company right so you have the like super alpha male or alpha woman you know what i mean yeah because we’ve had those too we’ve had some i mean i can remember some very strong some very powerful women that would you know just that uh and they all eventually you If they’re negative, if they got the wrong attitude, they all self-destruct and blow up eventually. But dealing with that can be how you’re doing the right thing. Ask questions. Hey, tell me about how awesome you are.

Speaker 1 | 27:05.456

Yep. So let’s move on to where I think the topic of this was because I think you sent me an invite after I responded. I wasn’t really searching for an invite. You had asked about… Something along the lines of how do you sell your projects and how do you manage to get things done? Why is so few IT projects get moved to? It’s a big topic.

Speaker 0 | 27:32.498

It’s a big topic, which is how do you influence executive leadership at the roundtable to get your big forklift project and get the million dollars that you need for the IT department, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 | 27:45.407

And so I made a response that said, basically, I haven’t had an IT budget. refused or project declined in the last decade. And I think that’s why you asked me to come. And so the very first thing that I would tell CIOs to do based on my 40 plus decades of failure and all kinds of failures in the past, but what I’ve learned, and I finally got to learn in my last decade, I would say, first thing you need to do when you go to a new company, a new position is build relationships with everybody. So. you don’t want to push an agenda. You just want to connect. You just want to know who they are and make them important. They are there. So Teddy Roosevelt said, nobody cares how much, you know, until they know how much you care.

Speaker 0 | 28:34.351

Yes.

Speaker 1 | 28:35.692

And so you really want to be the guy that everyone knows that you care, you care about them. And if you don’t care about them, you’ve got a big problem. You have to care about all your stakeholders and the people in the business.

Speaker 0 | 28:48.470

We’re all humans. We’re all going to die. We’ve all got some screwed up thing that we’re dealing with in our life. We’ve all got obstacles to overcome. We’re all dealing with some level of stress at some point. I mean, maybe not all of us. I mean, I just, most of, no, we all are. Let’s be honest.

Speaker 1 | 29:06.427

They are. And when you do establish relationships, people will share those stress moments. And those stress moments can be opportunities. And I’ll explain that in a minute. The next thing you need to do is you need to establish a reputation of trust. You’ve got to be trustworthy. If you are a CIO and people can’t just trust you, they’ve hired the wrong person. As a CIO, you’ve got access to all the information, all the things that they don’t want people to know because there’s lots of stuff. It’s just simple. Everyone knows that you don’t want to share payroll information. At least a lot of companies don’t want to share payroll information. But you’ve got access to payroll information. You’ve got to protect it. hand like you’ve never seen it and you’ve got to actually not want to see it we’ve got access to everybody’s uh browsing history i’ve explained people i have neither the time nor the interest to watch what people where people go it’s uh up to their managers to manage by performance not don’t ask me to manage behaviors because that’s really not what i i don’t want to police people as to where they can and cannot go they’re adults that’s

Speaker 0 | 30:09.298

an interesting oh how many people how many it directors have had someone come to them and say hey

Speaker 1 | 30:13.748

what’s my employee looking at that’s nice well that has happened when somebody does come to me and says and say they have had they’ve had a report and that’s has happened where we had a situation where somebody when i was working for one of our local governments early on i’ve worked for uh roanoke county and unfortunately uh somebody was using the library computers to show porn to kids and uh they had reports of it and i had to go find it and and

Speaker 0 | 30:43.072

show it and then that course meant somebody got fired it’s interesting i’m not interesting i mean it’s a crazy unfortunate but when i spoke with and this is just a side topic i asked um um i found over interviewing multiple people over time and every now and then you know crime rings come up and everything and a lot of those child pornography rings they it’s it’s not the it’s not the guys the creepy guys that you would think are, you know, that you would try to profile just by looking at them. A lot of times it’s people in the state and local government. It’s like, you know, the head of the schools, it’s a principal, it’s someone that’s in a position of power that has access to children.

Speaker 1 | 31:28.550

Unfortunately, that is, that is often the case. So, so, so you build trust by being, having integrity and just. making sure that people know that if they confide in you, you’re not going to talk to anyone else about it. You just really have to get that sterling reputation of trust because then you need to move into finding opportunities. And as I mentioned earlier, stress and other people will sometimes result in people confiding into you. Like I’ve had one manager, plant manager came to me and says, my bonus wasn’t where I expected it. Now, who’s going to share that with somebody they don’t know? He’s upset that his bonus wasn’t as… high as it should be and so i started asking him questions as to what the reason for that was it became a it that launch that conversation launched a four million dollar project that netted six million in the first year uh so it’s these are so having listening to the people you built relationships with uh can help you find the opportunities that will then make for uh a good project. So before we could launch that project, we had to build the business case. So when he told me what the reasons were, we had to go find what he thought the reasons were. We had to dig into it to figure out what was going on in this particular situation. It was a plant among many plants in this corporation. And so we had the opportunity to go mine the financials and see how was this plant performing compared to our best performer. And that makes things really simple because now you can see that our best performer performs at this rate and this guy’s performing at that rate. The delta is the business opportunity. You can also do the average is this. And if we could just move them to the average, this is the business opportunity. And if we then moved all plants to the average or from that were below average into the, you know, if we could get them into the first quartile, that would be awesome. In this particular business. It was a 1% increase in sales would result in, it was a $5 billion corporation. So 1% increase in sales, which is huge. And we found out the reason for this particular plant was the plant was having downtime. The downtime, it could be all kinds of reasons why a plant has downtime. It could be lack of materials. It could be lack of flavor. In this particular case, it was the lines were breaking because of poor maintenance. And so… We got the stakeholders, so we found the case, and we talked to them.

Speaker 0 | 34:16.800

How did you discover that that was the problem? Because I’ve dealt with this, and I do a lot in manufacturing, a lot. And there’s another use case where we discovered that just management of the orders alone stopped the downtime. So you have, if a small order came in, everything had to shut down everything had to be cleaned all the machines had to be clean because it was food manufacturing do that small order shut everything down again clean all the machines go back to production because like an emergency order came in so just by i can’t remember how they you know did it but and then it was and then it was also how do we clean faster how do we do this faster so not only did they make the whole change around of cleaning faster one thing then they basically i don’t know whether it was through erp or whatever it just Better order management alone through software made a complete reduction in temp staff, 100% no longer needed temp staff, and 170% increase in production. yep boom and then who knows what the time factor was too so that was just you know astronomical growth or you know a massive massive dollar figure but um so keep so i’d be interested to know how you guys figured out oh it was this broken machines you would think that would be obvious but obviously it wasn’t well

Speaker 1 | 35:34.715

it wasn’t just one broken machine that was the problem it was machines were breaking all over the place but they weren’t and but they didn’t have to break a lot in the sense that you didn’t have to have one break every day to to sap three percent of productivity out of a plant and uh but the way we do it so as i mentioned i worked for a company called canon canada’s japanese and they are well known for their management techniques and one of the reasons why i worked for them is because i wanted to learn about their uh management techniques and one of the things they had a couple of things so you’ve probably heard of six sigma and lean manufacturing and continuous improvement So in the continuous improvement cycle, one of the things they do is they promote this idea of ask why seven times. So tell my kids to do that.

Speaker 0 | 36:25.188

Why? Why? Why? Give me a reason.

Speaker 1 | 36:29.071

Why is your bonus low? Well, because we didn’t meet our productivity. Why is your productivity low? Did you have labor with problem? No, not labor problems. How about raw materials? No, not raw materials. Well, if it’s not raw materials and it’s not labor and you’re. plant was so your plant’s just not running well yeah we had some breakdowns and so it’s not running yeah yeah you just keep going eventually you get down to you can also create ishikawa diagrams which also known as herringbone diagrams where you list all of the potential causes and then you do a pareto chart to list the top 20 causes of failures and then you work the problem starting with the most cost you then do the financial analysis to determine which one has the greatest opportunity you for improvement and that turned out to be we needed to go from reactive maintenance to predictive maintenance and we changed the culture all right so one of the so we have to have so review we build relationships we establish trust we find the opportunities which comes from having the trust of stakeholders we build the business case fortunately on this one i didn’t have to wait on timing but wait on timing is also huge uh like the last sip trunk one timing was COVID. COVID hits and everybody needs to work from home. And we needed all of our legacy phone systems to work at people’s houses. And that meant let’s move everything to voice over IP. So we’re moving everything to SIP trunking and now everybody can take their phone and pretend that they’re in the office when they’re working from home. So timing is sometimes huge. You don’t want to just… It’s kind of a great way to get slapped in the face is to come in and say, I have an opportunity. I know what I can do for you. Because a lot of times people don’t want to hear that. They want to tell you what you can do for them. So when somebody says, I need our people to work from home, then I go, okay, I’ll make that happen. I don’t tell them I’m going to do SIP trunking. I just tell them I’m going to make that happen. And by the way, I saved you 90% of your phone bill cost. And I consolidated your bills from five vendors down to one. So accounting department loved it. the people loved it. It all worked.

Speaker 0 | 38:45.375

I love doing that. That’s a fun, that’s just a fun exercise. That by the way, the behind the scenes program at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, which is very select and only free for certain people, will do that for you at absolutely no cost. Anyways, we love that. We love that exercise. That’s easy. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. That’s like another episode, the low-hanging IT fruit. but keep going.

Speaker 1 | 39:14.247

So when your timing is right, you need to make sure that you have used, as you said, connect and connect, connect,

Speaker 0 | 39:23.592

discover, respond. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 39:25.153

Yeah. Respond. So into discovery, you want to know, you want to make sure that you understand the with them. I like to use that term. What’s in it for me, for every stakeholder that’s involved. Yep. Because not every stakeholder cares about that. We saved money. The finance department did the. town manager only wanted to make sure that people could work safely from home. So you had to, you have to, when you present, when you talk about this stuff, it’s in the last bit is when you’re presenting, it’s never about technology. So I, when I presenting it, I’m saying, I’m going to make it so that people can work from home and I will save a lot of money. And I never mentioned SIP trunking or voiceover IP. They don’t care. i know that’s like a glaze over real quick so i see we’re going to be using session initiated protocol our session border controllers set up to automatically load balance yeah we’re going to use the first routing nobody edge of town we’re going to have this rounder and so we we need to forget Yes, we know all this technical stuff, all this jargon. We’ve got to not talk about it.

Speaker 0 | 40:38.986

I yell at people sometimes in meetings, like, will you please stop using industry acronyms that no one knows what that means? It’s like if a doctor uses his acronyms and the IT guy uses his acronyms, you know, it’s like sometimes they match up.

Speaker 1 | 40:53.212

Communication.

Speaker 0 | 40:57.134

Like MRI, there’s got to be an existence of that in the technology world somewhere. I thought you were talking about my back. Keep going. So, yes, yes. Okay, so discovery, connect, discovery, questions, whatever it is, respond. And, of course, if you’re in the government, no one cares about money.

Speaker 1 | 41:18.748

We’re just going to spend the money.

Speaker 0 | 41:21.529

Oh, yeah. The taxpayers’money. Who cares? I want to hear about money. Because then taxpayers take care of it.

Speaker 1 | 41:26.713

That was one of the ways that I established trust was that I reduced my budget. They didn’t reduce it. I did.

Speaker 0 | 41:35.307

Then the bus drivers got it.

Speaker 1 | 41:37.569

Well,

Speaker 0 | 41:37.929

I don’t care.

Speaker 1 | 41:38.870

We’re going to move that over to… It got moved over to a park. And that park became another set of projects that we worked on. So it was a huge park. But the point is, my responsibility was to the taxpayers to reduce costs and improve services. And I… viewed all of the departments as my customers who were also trying to achieve the same thing. And I was to enable them as best I could. And sometimes that means doing IT things. And sometimes it happens that I got pressed into doing non-IT things.

Speaker 0 | 42:17.024

For example?

Speaker 1 | 42:18.205

Okay. So I’m working for a small company called Smithfield Foods that had a, one of their plants killed 36,000 head a day. So tiny little plant. in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Yeah. We had, so there I am working for Smithfield Foods. I’m head of their East Coast operations in IT. Yeah. And one of the things that when I first got there, the CIO said, please make sure that we install this particular warehouse management system in Tar Heel, North Carolina, so that they can manage this 36,000 head a day being slaughtered and processed into, turned into hams and whatever, bacon. sausages. So we had that, we got that, that software installed and I, that learning experience of what all the software did, because I was brand new to the company when, when this started, but I learned all I could about this, this particular system. And one day I’m hearing the salespeople complain about another warehouse, a different warehouse that was a third-party warehouse and how it seemed like everything coming out of that warehouse was failing. Nothing was getting delivered on time. The right product wasn’t making it to the customer. And they’re all upset about it. So being the guy that listens to my stakeholders, I sent out my team to go out and see what it was that was going on at that particular third-party warehouse. Found out that the software that they were using could not handle something that we call sell it or smell it. You have to sell within certain shelf life or the product, it’s fresh pork, is going to start smelling. And big customers like Food Lion, Hannaford, whatever, want to have at least 10 days, sometimes 12 days of shelf life remaining so that they have time to get it off their shelves and sell it. So we have to, when we slaughter an animal, we have about 15 days of shelf life. So we’ve got to move it out of the warehouse within about three, four to three, three to four days, sometimes five days. Each customer has different requirements about how many shelf life, how much shelf life they have. So when we ship product, we have to pick the product that is best suited for their shelf life requirements. We don’t want to ship the freshest. We want to ship what’s fresh within their requirements. So that meant knowing the sell-by date of every case that was in our 16,000 pallet location warehouse, refrigerated warehouse. Their software could not do that. And people were grabbing whatever pallet they could find and sending it. And then-So it was random.

Speaker 0 | 45:09.378

It was complete random dated stuff for-

Speaker 1 | 45:12.218

And Food Lion and Hannaford were getting it and saying, this is not within our shelf life requirements and sending it back. And then finally, they got to the point where they said, we don’t want to do business with you. And they started shutting business down. Well, because I’m not the CIO at Smithfield, the CIO is enjoying his Christmas vacation. And it’s Christmas Eve and I’m at work and I’m the only, I’m the highest guy there from the IT department. And the president of Smithfield Foods calls me into his, he calls him. my CIO into the office and I tell him he’s not there. He’s on vacation. He says, then you show up. I show up. And he says, are you aware of the problem that’s going on at this warehouse? And I said, yes, sir, we are aware. Do you know how to fix it? I said, yes, sir, I do know how to fix it. And he goes, then here you’ve got an American express. It’s got no credit limit on it. Go make it happen. All right. We had actually,

Speaker 0 | 46:02.876

they have those cards.

Speaker 1 | 46:04.796

Yes, they do. And I could, and I could spend millions with no. there was no credit limit and they said you know every purchase you make it’s a career decision um but anyway we had because they need it guys everywhere else anyway so let’s go for it so because my team had seen what the problem was and we had actually put together a plan in case we got the call because i was expecting we were ready to go and within uh three months we turned there we took over the warehouse so i wasn’t just the it guy i was the warehouse manager uh So we took over the warehouse and we reversed the problem and we gained back our customers. And I’ve got a nice little letter from the CIO claiming that I single-handedly, which it wasn’t single-handedly, but he says that I single-handedly saved the company $8 million a year and brought back customers. But it’s so sometimes you’ve got to be prepared to do things that are not IT things. So managing a warehouse was not something I ever expected to do. But if you’re in IT, you have… you better know how to change and adapt. You better know how to learn because as your previous, I was reading your, listening to your last podcast, your previous presenter was talking about how everything changes in IT and it changes fast. So if you aren’t the person that can learn new things, you’re in the wrong position. But if you can learn new things, you can learn pretty much anything. You can learn how to run a warehouse.

Speaker 0 | 47:34.579

You’re in an interesting position. You’re in an interesting. position. I’d love to ask you, because you’re in the end game right now. And I’ve asked people multiple times, what’s your end game? And most IT guys don’t have an answer. They just don’t. And I don’t want that for people. I want for people what I want for myself. And I don’t want the, I don’t want them to have a bad work-life balance. I don’t want them to have a dream worth dying for, failing for, whatever you call it. You’re out. You’re out of the game. You’re, you’re done. You said you’re retired. So like, what was the, I mean, what was the end game? Did you ever plan for that? Or were you just like, I’m just going to do the best of the best and help everyone and, you know, and what happens happens. Did you have a plan?

Speaker 1 | 48:25.571

Uh, so loose, loosely, I mean, the. I started it very, very early in my career when I was not even working for, when I was freelancing. I started my financial path to retirement with getting out a whole life insurance policy so that I would start to squirrel away money so that I could retire. I always, I didn’t let, I was one of the people that if there was an opportunity at another company that. did better, I took it. So it was a case of, I felt like-What is that though?

Speaker 0 | 49:05.042

What does that mean? Because sometimes it’s not just money. It’s not just about like, oh, I’m getting paid more money. So that’s important, right? Because I talk with a lot of people like, Phil, there’s a job over here. I’m going to take it. I’m like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don’t go there. Because it’s kind of like if you took a job at, they got a new job, it’s three times as much money. It’s at BlackBerry. No, don’t go. don’t go yeah not now not now you know if it was back in the day yes but right like no if like what blackberry’s still around are they still no don’t go like i got a really great job it’s at uh uh you know i’m trying to think of yeah nothing don’t sue me of aya you know i mean i think they’re still in business you know what i mean it’s like yeah i mean sorry uh nortel nortel yeah um uh yeah you got you get it all right um

Speaker 1 | 49:57.386

So, you know, sometimes you don’t know that what you’re getting into is toxic. You think it’s good. It’s not. And that has happened where I took, I was fat, dumb and happy working for the. uh town of run oak when a headhunter called and says i got a job opportunity for you at that time i said you know this was a lot of money when i said i’m not going to take a job unless it’s uh six figures and she goes well that’s not a problem they’ll pay six figures and i said okay so i took the job is at the front of that six figures yeah well it was still just a one but but at the time i it was a very substantial increase over what i was being paid by the local government as you can imagine uh but uh after being there for uh a little while i was sent i was routinely sent out for these projects that lasted three months away from family yeah now they were very accommodating in the sense that they in one sense i had to go to to chicago one time and they flew me via private jet they flew my they gave me a three-bedroom apartment in the loop of chicago for myself you

Speaker 0 | 51:12.810

They, my alone at night away from your family, thinking about their credit.

Speaker 1 | 51:18.472

They did send my family in, uh, uh, once a month to, and they flew them in. So it was, uh, they did, they tried to make these three months since yes, not so painful, but they were painful because you’re, as you can imagine being away from eight kids, I was away from three kids and they were very young at the time. So, uh, yes, uh, that. I got a lot of money, but I also said to myself, you know, this is not good. This is not working out. I then had to go find a different opportunity where I did not have to be away from family so much.

Speaker 0 | 51:49.215

Yeah, it’s not true.

Speaker 1 | 51:49.915

But so it was a case of find the opportunities that work for you. This last move, as I mentioned, it was being semi-retired. So the end game was to make sure I had enough money to retire so that when I retired, I did not have to work for money. I still work, but I don’t do it for money. I mentioned to you earlier that I’m doing this thing in Excel called 5G. That’s a whole other topic. But my end game was that when I retire, I’ll have enough money to travel. We have a budget that will allow us to travel to visit. We want to go to Yellowstone next summer. We want to go to France the year after that. We went to Scotland this year. We’ll be going to California in December, actually in November. And then I’ve got to speak at Tucson, Arizona in December about 5G.

Speaker 0 | 52:52.299

Is 5G controlled? Wait, 5G as in 5G LTE? 5G? No,

Speaker 1 | 52:56.721

5G is the fifth generation in financial modeling within Excel.

Speaker 0 | 53:01.723

See, there we go. There’s the acronyms again. I was looking at your Excel post, actually. As we’re on this call, and we won’t go down that dark hole right now. Maybe we’ll have that.

Speaker 1 | 53:12.656

It is a dark hole. A lot of people are going, Excel, what?

Speaker 0 | 53:16.478

That’s how I manage my database. What’s wrong with Excel?

Speaker 1 | 53:20.821

Well, it is how I manage to get trust. I would say that you’ve got just a quick dive down that hole. People complain about Skunkworks and Shadow IT because everyone’s using Excel to do Shadow IT. Well, that’s true. One of the reasons why they’re using Excel is because IT is not helping them. And that really upsets people when they’ve got this project that needs to be done. And IT goes, I don’t, we don’t have, that’s not going to have enough return on it. I’m not going to spend my, my C programmers, my Java programmers time on developing your solution. So no, we’re not going to do it. Just doesn’t arrive to the level of importance. We’ve got these other big projects that need to be done. Well, that’s a great way to upset a lot of people. One of the things I did with Excel is instead of. have i would say a really key point that’s that that’s interesting because i don’t think that’s ever come up on 207 shows is um the number of requests the the the software dev guys get but we never covered that so it in some situations they were some of the things that they needed to do were simple excel solutions and i knew excel so i just say here here it is i’ll fix it for you and with in some cases hours maybe in some cases a day or two They had a solution that was developed by IT and they were very happy with it because it was their solution and it didn’t require a lot of time. So that built a ton of trust. I can’t tell you how many times that’s gotten people to go to their boss and say, you know, look what Craig did for me. And that just, that really helps. It not only, so it elevated the status of IT. Gained trust.

Speaker 0 | 55:02.007

let’s book the Excel 5G show I want to talk about this we’ll do this live via screen share let’s do Phil’s budget. Let’s make an app for my household or something and build it all in Excel.

Speaker 1 | 55:18.467

Then you need to take a look at 5G episode number two. It is my departmental budget and my personal budget. I don’t show my personal budget, but it’s the application I use. And one of the things that you will find, it’s just.

Speaker 0 | 55:31.916

I don’t mind showing my personal budget. Oh, he spends. Oh, there’s a thousand dollars at the supermarket. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 55:39.261

Easy. At eight kids, you better believe it. Is that a date?

Speaker 0 | 55:42.967

I remember a new record. I remember like, we hit a new record. We’re like at the supermarket line. I’m like taking pictures of the screen or anything. People are like, what’s going on here? I’m like, I just spent $1,069. Put that stuff back.

Speaker 1 | 56:01.254

So, yeah. So I used Excel to build trust. But yes, I understand why IT people go, oh. we can’t excel as horrible as you say your databases in excel yeah absolutely let’s see if we can’t uh that’s how beyond excel got started it was basically showing it people how to bring data from databases like your erp into excel for analysis okay so the idea was no we’re not going to have a database in excel we’re going to use our we’re going to leverage our databases so people can get real-time information and do real-time analysis Yes. And we can do it.

Speaker 0 | 56:41.051

People think it’s in Excel.

Speaker 1 | 56:44.093

Well, that happens.

Speaker 0 | 56:48.276

Make people think we landed on the moon. Everyone believes it.

Speaker 1 | 56:52.999

Yes. The conspiracy theories. Anyway, that’s it for me. Build relationships, establish a reputation of trust, find opportunities, build a business case, wait on timing, determine all stakeholders, and they’re with them. That’s it for me. and present in a way that it doesn’t mention the technology. Those are my key.

Speaker 0 | 57:14.190

Greg, it has been an absolute pleasure talking with you. And I do want to talk about Excel 5G. Is it 5G Excel or is it Excel 5G?

Speaker 1 | 57:28.320

We call it 5G modeling.

Speaker 0 | 57:30.281

Oh, sorry. 5G modeling. I’m really stupid right now. I just know I sounded real stupid.

Speaker 1 | 57:37.314

nobody knows about it it’s it’s it’s good it was launched july 6th at a conference in in london we we need to redo that and talk about that london yeah so so for it it’s cbse for compute component based software engineering for excel something that’s only been available since the introduction of lambda which is a whole nother discussion i

Speaker 0 | 58:00.520

always mix up my london friends and my my australian friends because australia they’re like hey mate and then the london guys are like You know what I’m talking about. Yeah. You know, yeah. You got to say yeah. Every other words.

Speaker 1 | 58:12.712

Yeah. I have lots of Australian friends. As a matter of fact, I’ve been presenting with my Australian, I call them the three Aussie Aussies, about 5G. Because for some reason, they’ve taken me under their wing with their webinars. So they seem to like what I say about 5G. So we’ll see.

Speaker 0 | 58:35.805

Okay. We’re going to do that. Well, thank you very much, sir. I hope you have a wonderful, what day of the week is it? Thursday. Well, you’re, you’re retired now, so it doesn’t even matter. It’s all just do whatever the heck you want to do, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 58:47.625

That’s right. That’s I do whatever I want to do. And that’s another, you’ll have to look at one of my LinkedIn articles about that.

Speaker 0 | 58:57.892

Beautiful.

Speaker 1 | 59:00.254

Maybe your creative writing might be able to say, Craig, you, this, you really could do better with creative writing.

Speaker 0 | 59:06.154

My degree is going to be completely erased soon with some sort of chat GPT or something. You know what I mean? I’ve already tried to clone my voice, my writing voice. I actually hired an AI guy. And I was like, can you clone my writing? What I want is just write about this. And I want it to come out in my tone of voice with all my crazy stuff that I say and that type of tone. It got close, but then as it layers and layers, as the layers increase, because it kind of builds on stuff, it becomes, it loses it. It just loses it. But that’s a thing for another show. Thank you so much for being on Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Everyone find Craig on LinkedIn because that’s where we exist pretty much until this show becomes super popular and it grows somewhere else. So thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for