Speaker 0 | 00:09.259
All right, well, welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today I’m excited to introduce Joe Willis, the Director of IT for Fellers. Although this is a new role, Joe has been through the IT grinder. Joe, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your history.
Speaker 1 | 00:29.492
Yeah, I’m Joe. I’ve been in IT for about 15 years. Started out in computer graphics, did a lot of engineering design work for a company that built industrial generators and all the enclosures and all the components that support those. And went into IT from there. And then I keep kind of finding myself in a space of companies that are trying to grow to the next level. It’s often been purchased by private equity from a mom and pop, and they’re trying to figure out how to scale and grow their IT. So, yeah, as you mentioned, I am new to Feller’s. I’ve been there for about three years. It’s my first introduction into kind of the warehouse and distribution space. There’s a lot of interesting challenges here that I’ve never encountered before, but most of my experience is in manufacturing, metal forming, and the like.
Speaker 0 | 01:41.117
Okay, so I actually hadn’t picked up on the warehousing piece of it. Having a little understanding of that and kind of touching on it, are you guys doing any of the warehousing automation? Do you guys have any of the bots cruising around the warehouse and moving things around?
Speaker 1 | 01:57.048
No, we’re not there yet. So Fellers is a private purchase by private equity a couple of years ago. Prior to that, it was very much driven by a can do spirit, a lot of hard work and a lot of people to make that happen. So currently, all of our warehouses are would not be designed to implement that. We would have to go through several layers of. automation first on the software side and start piloting out the physical automation.
Speaker 0 | 02:30.745
Okay. In our pre-call, we talked about a couple of different things, the manufacturing experience. Tell me a little about the IT around that and what you experienced going through that. What’s different about the manufacturing world or Not necessarily different, but what were the unique things that you found within that area?
Speaker 1 | 02:56.843
Yeah, so I’ve been in manufacturing almost my whole career up until about three months ago. So I don’t have a huge, a good frame of reference as to what other industries do. But I have a lot of colleagues who were in like public education and MSP support. So they go to an office, you know. talk to co-workers around a water cooler and in manufacturing um you know you almost have to have a pair of uh an extra set of clothes to change into because you’re gonna get dirty you’re you’re working on computer components of machines that are probably older than i am 30 40 years old 50 years old in a couple of cases just caked with dust and grease and exhausts fumes, exhaust dust. And so it’s just a very interesting environment. You’re working with some really interesting folks who are so afraid of technology, but they can look at a green screen running a 500 kilowatt laser and they know their way around that interface like nobody’s business. They can hard code, NC code. Based on the flex of the metal that’s on the bed. I mean, these are really smart folks. They’re just really, I hate to say concerned, but really hesitant around change. And technology is nothing but change. So days are varied. You could be at a desk all day working on a network stack. Or, again, the plasma cutter goes down. And so you have to go down there and troubleshoot why. something’s not working on the floor.
Speaker 0 | 04:51.926
How many of the devices that you’re troubleshooting on the floor are smart devices? And I mean, I just picked up on the fact that you talked about some of them being rather old, so they may be. enabled, let’s say, versus smart. So what kind of fun did you have with that? And then trying to get a hold of manuals, I’m sure, because they didn’t put them online.
Speaker 1 | 05:15.852
Right. So, yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a big push about manufacturing 4.0, and now we’re starting to talk about 5.0 and digital. twins and connected devices and machines at the end. You know, there’s all these really neat technology concepts around manufacturing. But where I’m from the Midwest, I’m part of manufacturing. And a lot of the places around here, they don’t have the investment for that. You’re talking about sometimes they’re small, five, six, ten employee companies. And they… had a machine, they filled a niche, and then they found themselves doing something at a scale that they really didn’t intend to do when they started this business. And so they don’t have the resources to purchase these sometimes hundred thousand, maybe multi-million dollar machines that have all this stuff enabled. So they figure out, they either do it through manual processes or through paper or through a lot of talk amongst the employees. And the machines that I mostly worked on were not tech enabled might be a good word for it. So they weren’t designed in the last 10 or 15 years. They’re 25, 30 year old technology. And my at my previous employer, they built the machines in house that. managed the patented manufacturing process for the components we built. And so a lot of that is just done by PLCs. So they built the machines, they would install PLCs off the shelf. Many of these PLCs, you could communicate over a standard network and So some of the controls and troubleshooting were related to the updated PLCs, but those PLCs were often driving motors that were 10, 15, 20 years old. So it just really kind of depended on the day, on the process. But there was also the component of a lot of these machines that you purchase are managed by desktop computers. So… We would, kind of the company I worked for originally out of college, they bought a couple four by eight foot plasma cutting machines. They could cut like an inch and a half thick steel plate using plasma. And the machine was driven by PLCs and a lot of standard manufacturing controls. But to send the code to the machine, it was just a Windows XP desktop. And it was installed in like a case that was attached to the machine. So those were great because you can troubleshoot them like you would any computer. The caveat there is that a lot of these companies, they’re not software companies. They’re hardware. They’re… equipment companies first, and they’ve found this thing that can feed the new technology, these offline NC control programs, and that’s it. It’s a point in time. They make the software, they sell it. So what happens when Windows 7 comes out? You work with the company. Sometimes the company doesn’t support it. Oh, we don’t support Windows 7. you have to stay on XP. And so you just follow up with them year after year after year, five, seven years later, hey, I got to get off XP. What do you have for me? And they’ll sometimes not be able to upgrade the system that they sold you previously. So you have to buy a new head unit. You’ve got to buy a new debt, you know, whatever. In a few cases, the good vendors, they will have application teams that work. can upgrade their applications and you can, assuming you pay the maintenance fee every year, which lots of companies don’t like doing hey we can save some money because we won’t pay the maintenance we never need to call them exactly you need to we’ve got dave down here who’s been working for 17 years he knows how to he knows how to do it so we don’t need we don’t need that maintenance stuff right and all of them are networked of course yep yep they’re all networked and uh and and that’s where you get into a lot of the um there’s a there’s a lot of risks around manufacturing equipment. Especially in the power industry, you hear of power grids being brought down by malware because these are all legacy pieces of equipment that no one put any firewall on. No one really thought there could be a risk of a virus for that kind of thing. They’re all on the network. They’re all exposed and no one’s watching it.
Speaker 0 | 10:55.368
Yeah, we had… At my last job, we had some camera systems, and they were out of date, and we couldn’t update them, and we weren’t paying maintenance for them. They were of a manufacturer from a dubious country, and one of them was being attacked. And so we stopped the attack. We cleared that out, and then we just locked them down and made it where people couldn’t access the cameras from outside the network. And, oh, man, the stink that arose out of that. We had the owner come in and say, what, they’re going to see us selling a hot dog? You’re worried about that? And I’m like, no, that’s not the problem. The problem is it’s a full server that is being used, and we’ve left the door wide open for them to come in, take control of that server, and then start to get somewhere else.
Speaker 1 | 11:49.166
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 11:50.407
And he just didn’t get it. He just, you know, look. It’s cameras. They can see my hot dogs.
Speaker 1 | 11:57.589
Big deal. Yeah. And it’s hard. It’s hard because a lot of, in the space that most of my experience is in, they’re brilliant people. They’re brilliant in that one thing that they’ve lived and breathed. Their father started the company or, you know, grandfather even. And that’s their focus. And it’s hard to communicate. Here’s the real implication. this risk yeah it’s a camera but like you said it’s got a CPU memory it’s got a network connection and it can start doing things outside of your control and now your network is blamed and then you’ve got all of the different organizations around you know the email blackmailing email and such we have we have at a previous company we had that happen where It was a computer, had malware, started sending out thousands of emails a minute. And then we got put, our IP address got put on the blacklist. And now we can’t send email and no one’s accepting email from it. And it’s hard to get off of those RBLs.
Speaker 0 | 13:13.575
It is hard to get off of the blacklist.
Speaker 1 | 13:16.017
Yeah, it really is.
Speaker 0 | 13:17.818
And thankfully, you know, that’s one of those double-edged swords. That’s what I’m saying. I’m glad that it’s hard for people to get off of it. But when it was a legitimate organization, like, bye. Yeah. Yeah. You know, come on. There’s got to be an easy button. No. No,
Speaker 1 | 13:34.449
there’s not. There are no easy buttons, especially when things go wrong. There’s no easy button at all.
Speaker 0 | 13:40.513
We also talked about this other thing, this three-letter wonderful technology that is, it’s parsing text files. But. Business runs on it. And so much of the world leverages it. I mean, we all use it, whether we know it or not. Anybody that picks up a prescription or has insurance uses EDI. So tell me a little about your EDI history and understanding some of the challenges that you faced.
Speaker 1 | 14:13.559
Yeah. So I so my my my previous employer. spent nine years in the automotive industry. We supplied exhaust components for the commercial truck, commercial trucking industry. And so I knew exactly. So I knew what EDI was because in, in, in my previous to that experience, EDI was this business concept. Oh, I got to check the EDI today. I’m going to go to the EDI portal. So I knew what it was. I knew that we received information from our customers, order information. And I knew someone kind of did stuff on a computer, and that was really it.
Speaker 0 | 15:02.541
You know what? Let me interrupt and ask real quick again. What does EDI stand for? We both know what it is, and we assume everybody else does. But I remember that day when the CFO said, hey, do you know what EDI is? I’m like, no. He said, go learn it.
Speaker 1 | 15:20.217
So, yeah, EDI. It’s a very simple concept, right? Electronic data interchange. It is in concept. It is a simple way for a customer or a vendor or a logistics partner to communicate with you and your systems in a standard format.
Speaker 0 | 15:45.818
Right. So it doesn’t matter what what system you have, whether it’s SAP, Oracle, some third party. some proprietary TMS, WMS, transportation management system, warehousing management system, shipper management system. It puts all of that data into that government-supplied format so that it’s a text file. And were yours Asterix delimited?
Speaker 1 | 16:18.175
No, we didn’t have any Asterix. delimited we had pipe limited delimited delimited we had um space delimited so that it was each variable had 15 or 30 spaces as defined by the standard and so you would so in those the the documents were almost illegible because everything was at different pace different spots on the page and so we had space delimited pipe, we had tilde, we had what else? But we didn’t have any asterisk, if I remember correctly.
Speaker 0 | 17:01.585
So in transportation, the majority of them are asterisk limited. So between data field, you had the asterisk. But that’s always fun when you have somebody put in something like open from asterisk 8am to 5pm asterisk to asterisk. And then there goes all your formatting.
Speaker 1 | 17:19.573
Or when your customer name has an asterisk or a special character in it, and that throws your mapping system for a loop. Yeah. So, yeah. So I knew EDI as this business concept. But then when I started in my previous employer, I was kind of thrown into it head first. So I came in and had an individual who was reporting to me. who was managing the EDI, she left after about six months of me being there. And so I had to jump in and figure it out. And so it’s a highly technical framework. But on top of that framework is built, systems built using business rules and business logic. And that… directly relates to your sales numbers. And so you have this CEO of the company who’s very interested in the EDI for this week. But what they’re really interested is the business aspect of that. They’re interested in the orders. They’re interested in the shipments. They’re interested in the confirmations. The EDI is an incredibly technical foundation for that. One of the big frustrations in our company was you would get from high-level sales folks, hey, we have an EDI issue. Our order board is empty for this week, so can somebody check the EDI? You go and you check the EDI. You check the technical levels. All the documents are there. We’re seeing all the mappings translate correctly. We’re seeing that get into the system. So it’s not an EDI issue.
Speaker 0 | 19:16.578
So data is flowing. You can prove it. You’ve got, you got logs showing that the file left their system and landed in your system. It went from the communication server, FTP, SFTP, encryption servers to the server that parses it, does mapping, feeds it into the management system or the ERP.
Speaker 1 | 19:37.189
And then magically it’s gone. And so, so So that’s kind of where, at least in my experience, until someone like me stepped in, we didn’t have that interface between the business understanding of what EDI does. and the functionality of EDI happening in your systems. And so it took several years for me to really learn the technical requirements for EDI, how you interact with your customer, because even though it’s a standard, nobody uses the standard in the same way. And so understanding how the standard relates to each individual company. A very quick example of that is we used mostly X12, which is an ANSI standard. And the X12 830 document is a forecast. So our customers would send us a forecast, this 830, saying here’s everything I expect to ship. Here’s everything I expect to purchase in the coming week. months, et cetera. And so some customers sent us a forecast. And then when they wanted to buy something, they would send us a second standard document called an 850, which is the purchase order. Here’s my forecast. Now here’s what I actually want this week. Here’s what I actually want next week. But our largest customer, they sent us everything on an 830. So the forecast document had their forecast, it had their firm demand, and their unfirm demand. So yes, we used EDI as a standard. Here’s the forecast document, but I’m not going to choose to use the forecast document as intended. And so every customer of ours had a different way of using the standard framework, and we had to accommodate for that.
Speaker 0 | 21:57.204
Oh, yeah. And it’s that push from the customer and having to meet their format because you want to take customers always right. And you don’t want to stop business. And I specifically don’t want to be the cause of not doing business just because, hey, what? Why? They’re perverting the standard.
Speaker 1 | 22:22.125
Right. Oh, no.
Speaker 0 | 22:24.427
I want the business. Give me money.
Speaker 1 | 22:27.469
Without their money,
Speaker 0 | 22:28.870
you don’t have a job.
Speaker 1 | 22:30.911
And yet the interface with our with our EDI vendor, because they would say, oh, well, in the 830 standard, you can’t use you can’t use a dash in in this description field. That is not on the standard. So our vendor wouldn’t allow. But the customer kept sending a dash in that in that field. And so. You kind of have to have a showdown. The customer’s not going to change. Well, you’re the only supplier that’s throwing a fit about it. So the customer’s not going to change. So now you’ve got to go to the vendor.
Speaker 0 | 23:04.996
I’ve heard that many a time.
Speaker 1 | 23:06.957
And so EDI is just this weird, weird Wild West world. It’s built on technology from 40 years ago, and it’s still running multibillion-dollar businesses.
Speaker 0 | 23:21.703
And, you know, I… Actually had the CFO come to me, I want to say five, ten years ago, probably ten years ago, and said, oh, EDI is a dying technology. And if anything, it’s continuing to ramp up. We have more and more organizations are leveraging that as a communication system to pass information because then now it’s not humans calling each other and passing information and only partially passing half of the information. So that more phone calls are required later on. It is a system where they can just dump all the data in, shove it over to you. And yeah, too bad about the dash, man. It’s what’s in the system. Deal with it. And half the time, well, if you’re lucky, you can have that showdown between the customer and the end. I don’t even know what to call it in the manufacturing world. But… But otherwise, you’re writing some kind of a filter.
Speaker 1 | 24:24.477
Yep. Yeah. Most, when we did mapping in-house, we had to accommodate all of that ourselves. We had to employ a mapper or have one on staff. I was working with it long enough that I could make tweaks, but I was nowhere near having the ability to write a map from scratch. And then on the flip side, once you outsource it and use one of these big EDI. vendors, they try to make all of that seamless. They try to look at EDI from a business standpoint, logic and rules and workflows. But at the end of the day… We always had to go back to that incredibly technical level, look at the code in the mapping in order to accommodate this unique scenario or this unique scenario. And it’s just, it’s a world where you’re always chasing your tail.
Speaker 0 | 25:22.158
Right. And if your users were anything like the users I was used to, they hear EDI and go, oh, it’s IT. And then just hand it off. and they don’t even bother to look and learn. And they may hear you when you tell them no asterisks, no dashes, and then the seat rotates.
Speaker 1 | 25:45.400
Yep. Yeah, that happened. We had our superheroes in certain divisions, and we loved working with those folks because they knew all about the business side, and they learned from the technical, and so we could meet halfway. But then there were those other divisions where, yeah, the seat rotates. And EDI requires institutional knowledge of the specific industry, but also the company. And once that leaves, it’s so hard to build that knowledge. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 26:24.533
And if they don’t create some kind of a documentation or training manual or, you know, if you have the chance and the time. If they don’t teach those that follow behind them, then we’re stuck teaching them again. Well,
Speaker 1 | 26:40.661
that training and documentation is IT’s role and function, right? We’re the ones that are supposed to build the business training documents for all that. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 26:50.828
I’m supposed to, as the director or the CIO, I’m supposed to tell the billers how to bill.
Speaker 1 | 27:00.094
I was told that. I was told that. Yeah. It’s your responsibility to write the documentation to teach someone how to send an invoice out of the system.
Speaker 0 | 27:10.727
Right. And then training department? Right. Or, yeah, you got to go to the training department, but there’s no budget for training.
Speaker 1 | 27:19.511
Training is like maintenance with software, right? It’s not important. You can save those costs until it bites you in the butt.
Speaker 0 | 27:29.455
Right. And- And we’re the only ones dumb enough, Eric quotes, dumb enough to read the user manual or the directions. Because, you know, I don’t like reading the directions either. But I have had plenty of coworkers who, man, they’re not going to touch it until they’ve read the instructions and know all the ins and outs.
Speaker 1 | 27:54.391
I love leading people like that. I am not one of those people.
Speaker 0 | 28:01.340
Agreed. Totally. So, quick question on manufacturing, on EEI. What kinds of things did you learn from those experiences and from those challenges? You know, you’ve got machines that fall out of date, that are unsecurable, they’re unmaintained, or you maintain them the best you can, but new vulnerabilities that show up in Windows XP. Windows ain’t doing nothing to fix those anymore. And so what kind of things did you learn from those experiences that we can hand off to those listening to us for tomorrow? You know, like you talked about the scalability, the scalability problem of buying a machine to do a task. And then now they need now they’ve got the orders to do 10 times the volume that they. could on that machine and somehow you got to work your magic.
Speaker 1 | 29:05.650
Yeah. I, so I think I can bucket that into a couple of categories. We’ll come back to the scalability in a second. Yeah,
Speaker 0 | 29:14.673
that’s fine.
Speaker 1 | 29:15.954
I think what those issues helped me learn and understand is that there are a lot of key players in any business that have, special skills and talents that help them succeed in that thing. Very rarely do any of them understand IT. They don’t understand the technology. They don’t understand how it works. They don’t understand the importance of why we should pay maintenance. They don’t understand the security risk of having a PLC on the network. And so I had to be the one when I was told no, I had to figure out. Do I need to re-communicate to that person? Is there a different way that I can link what’s happening in my world to an equivalent happening in their world? Do I need to listen to my boss told me he’s not doing it? Is it worth a fight? Not a fight, but is it worth me bringing this topic up? Because I believe the risk is that great. It also taught me to just because. I feel something is right and I feel it’s the right thing to do. Ultimately, I’m there to serve my company. And part of that is what do my superiors think? Here is the risk. Here is me communicating that risk in my professional capacity. This is my job. Now, what do you want me to do? If you are willing to accept that risk and maintain operations, that’s great. But here’s how we’re going to button it up. I told you this might happen. Here’s the risk. You don’t want to pay for it. And then we’ll move on. And so that’s kind of the softer side. I think more along the lines of management. How do you interact with other managers at your level? How do you interact with superiors and that C-suite within your job and within your expertise? So it. It took me a lot. It took me too long to understand I needed to focus on developing those skills. But I think that’s a lot of, again, this machine that has Windows XP, it’s now 15 years past the XP retirement date. How am I going to get management to understand this is really important? We have a million dollars a year of business relying on this one machine. And. if we get a virus, if we get anything, if we lose an IDE hard drive, right. And Oh, by the way, we can’t, that computer is so old. It can’t use a hard drive. That’s more than eight gigs. Where am I going to find an eight gig ID hard drive? Like, so that that’s the softer side of what those experiences taught me.
Speaker 0 | 32:23.241
Yeah. And, and some of the fun with that is the answer is, well, just go buy another one, man. Just they, they, It’s a couple hundred dollars for another one. Why five of them? I don’t care. Get five of those machines. Make images of them. I think you guys have called it images. Make images of that machine, and then you got spares. And, you know, you said it’s worth multi-millions. It’s only going to cost me hundreds, maybe a thousand to get those five copies.
Speaker 1 | 32:51.664
Yep. Yep. Right. Yeah. And again, if. If they’re paying me to perform a function and that’s the direction I get, then being able to being able to accept that. Well, that was a hard lesson for me to learn, but that was all kind of part of that, those happenings and that experience. And then I think on the. IT side, how do you manage infrastructure? How do you manage your technology stack? Is that scalability? I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into a company and some major function that sometimes millions of dollars a week or millions of dollars a year rely on is an Access 95 database.
Speaker 0 | 33:49.381
Yeah, I just… drop my head on that because wait you you said key words here company million dollars and access access is for one person one person at a time you know maybe you’ve got 30 people that use it but only one person at a time can really access that and do the work otherwise you want a database with a gooey front end of some sort yep you And once you have that, then you can have multiple multi-tenancy, as they like to call it, available for it. But access is not that.
Speaker 1 | 34:30.436
So you’ve got this company that they found their niche. They scaled up unexpectedly, but they obviously want to make more money. How are we going to automate this? We need this data. How are we going to manage it? Oh, I went to school. And I can build a database and do this. And before you know it, you have scaled past what that solution can provide. And so. We had people creating Excel spreadsheets that were interconnected. So shipping looked at the supply chain Excel spreadsheet and pulled data. So people just knew, well, I need to put this data in this cell and then we can ship product. And again, that works fine when there’s one person, when there’s two people, when there’s three people. But now you have a company of… 85 people and 17 of them are all managing these unscalable processes and it breaks. And now it’s just, you’re putting gum on a hole in a dam and you’re duct tape and bailing wire and whatever it takes. But as soon as you add that next person, as soon as you add that next $100,000 a month in sales, those solutions do not scale. And so understanding that and trying to communicate, hey, we need this $100,000 piece of software. Yeah, we can spend 20 grand and do this, but it’s only going to last a year. And then we’re going to have to reimplement this bigger solution anyway. So how do you identify systems or processes that cannot scale? And then how do you accommodate for that? How do you sell the vision? How do you engineer the solution? How do you buy the solution? That was also an outcome of that experience.
Speaker 0 | 36:45.977
And so, you know, that’s an interesting, really interesting point because you basically have to wait until it breaks to identify half of these. Because, you know, the… spreadsheet examples a perfect one because that one’s like all over the board today you know if if people are if we’re using standalone installs of microsoft products and trying to share this then then the way to do that is you have a file server and everybody saves to that but it’s single tenancy i can open a spreadsheet and do the stuff close it save it close it put it back and then you can open it and do it yep um sharepoint helps enable some of that too. But if we take that step up from the standalone installs into like the 365 version, now both of us can actually edit it at the same time. But like five years ago, we couldn’t. I don’t know exactly when Microsoft finally introduced that multi-tenancy. I know Google introduced it way before Microsoft did. Now Microsoft is caught up, and yet there’s all the other systems that are doing it now because how many different versions of productivity suites are there? And there seem to be more growing. The last ITSM I was working on, they had their whole own separate productivity suite. I’m like, wait a minute, you guys are competing with Microsoft and Google?
Speaker 1 | 38:21.075
Yep. I just wanted a help desk. And what happens when… You use a system and you have your processes and now you’re going to engage a consulting firm for a huge project and they use a different platform.
Speaker 0 | 38:37.475
Yeah. And then, yeah, trying to get that communication or keep that communication between the two. Let everybody use the systems that they’re used to. But how do you how do you share that information? How do you without going out and finding that that minimum wage college intern to sit there and. Read it from one system, type it into the other. Read it from that system, type it into the other.
Speaker 1 | 38:59.185
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 39:00.486
And pay for two licenses for one person so that they have that software, this software.
Speaker 1 | 39:05.608
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 39:07.208
Oh, man. One of the other things that you talked about in our earlier call was the fun of one of the organizations you worked with. You had three locations, and you actually expanded multinational. Yeah. And I… I was interested in the experiences and the fun that you had doing that. Because, I mean, we’re talking, you went across the pond, man. You went all the way over. It wasn’t, you know, Canada or into Mexico. You went all the way to, I believe it was Poland?
Speaker 1 | 39:42.783
Yeah. Yeah. So I was hired by this company in order to facilitate the expansion of the business into the United States. Poland specifically. So I needed to come in. I need to look at the current infrastructure of the US. locations and figure out how again how do you scale that to a European location and so you know the idea of scale we could have we could have done that sound yep so the the idea of scale is something I learned really quickly at that company we could have just taken what we did and put it over there. But would that have been the right thing? We knew there were going to be more. So we decided to, and fortunately I got company backing to invest in more robust enterprise level hardware, finding really good partners to help us over there, expand the technology footprint. I was traveling there quite a bit. So I was hired by this company. A month later, I was in Poland for a week. And then two months after that, it was basically two weeks in Poland, two weeks home, two weeks in Poland, two weeks home. And so I did that for about four or five months, racked up. I probably could have claimed dual citizenship there for a little while. But I had never traveled before. Canada on a fishing trip and got on a cruise to Mexico, that sort of thing. So that was just a really neat time of kind of personal expansion, personal growth. I never thought I’d be navigating airports on my own in that capacity. But it was neat. I loved the country, fell in love with Poland. I did most of my travel in the southwestern region. of Poland, which is a traditionally blue-collar mining. They did a lot of coal mining in that area. And then just the culture in Poland, especially surrounding World War II and a lot of the atrocities that were directly targeted at Poland. So got to see a lot of really neat things, visited Auschwitz. So, I mean, it was just a… Really important part of my career, but also a really important part of my growth as far as who I am today.
Speaker 0 | 42:40.628
What kind of challenges did you run into? Because I’m assuming that there were there had to have been people who were not English speaking. I’m kind of making an assumption that you’re not Polish speaking. I believe that’s the correct language. And, you know, so there’s there’s that. Then, you know, two weeks over there, two weeks back, that’s barely enough time for your body to acclimatize to, what is that, a seven, eight hour difference, six hour difference?
Speaker 1 | 43:08.658
Six hour difference, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 43:10.179
Okay, because you’re on the East Coast.
Speaker 1 | 43:12.179
I’m on the East Coast. Yeah, so it was difficult for most of that time. So when I hired on, I had someone report in to me. But for a lot of that aggressive travel, I was a one man shop. So here I was trying to address the needs of just regular manufacturing plants, three of them, and trying to build out that infrastructure, go over there, work and train with their team. So I was also leading the ERP implementation. It helped that we required the management to know English. And so it was funny, a lot of these people. A lot of these folks who are near and dear to my heart, upon meeting them, they’re very apologetic. I’m so sorry. My English is very bad. Their English was incredible. And it was at least for me, it was very easy to communicate with them. It took me a while to understand that they learned British English, which is just different enough in a lot of concepts where I thought I was speaking clearly. and communicating well. And I found out that I was not. So I had to really kind of understand how do you communicate these difficult concepts to folks who know what you’re saying, but how do you get them to understand what you’re intending or meaning? And so that was a skill that I really had to learn. And when I’m speaking, And that helped me because working later for a larger global company, a lot of folks have told me that I’m really good at speaking to. folks who are not natively English speakers. But I learned when I’m talking in that environment, I slowed what I was saying by 50%. So it feels like you’re talking at a snail’s pace. You sound different to you and the English speakers on the call, but then they hear you very clearly. They understand. It gives them time to process stuff. And so Just kind of picking up how can I tweak things for them to understand me better. So it was a ride for sure. But it wasn’t difficult. And a lot of that reason was just because we required folks to speak English. But when we talked to the construction workers, they did not speak English. So we had to have a translator. And I had scheduled my travel weeks in advance. And so I needed the server room on the first week of February because that’s when I was going to arrive. We had the server arrive at a consultant’s house and he configured it and all this, you know, a lot of coordination. And when I visited the plant in January, everything was a month before. So they had built everything on center, even the office space. They had built everything. everything on cinder block, no concrete on the ground. And then they went back and poured the concrete. So I’m in there. Yeah, interesting, interesting stuff. So I’m there in January, mud floors, mud on my boots, and the server room has no floor, no walls. And I’m supposed to be installing equipment in there in two weeks. So I with the translator, we kind of have a come to Jesus meeting. This has to be done. It has to be done. Oh, no, no, no, no way. We can’t do that. No, you have to. So I was worried it wasn’t going to happen. Come back two weeks later. The most of the floor is still mud. But the server room has a floor. It has studded walls. It’s got drywall. The paint. was drying as I was building the server rack.
Speaker 0 | 47:35.155
So you’re in there just huffing the fumes.
Speaker 1 | 47:37.936
Yep. Yep. So yeah, certainly challenges. But yeah, it was a fun ride.
Speaker 0 | 47:45.859
Yeah. Some of those challenges are challenges we’ve just thrown in here. What were some of the things that you feel may be unique? you know doing the multinational or was it just the traveling to it and dealing with the multiple languages was there were there any other traditions that you’ve not seen well and traditions is probably the wrong word but any other practices
Speaker 1 | 48:12.990
that you’ve not run into the us that you ran into only there yeah i so uh the the structure around work ethic is unique um and i What I kind of learned was that area is unique in Poland. So they had a I don’t want to sound derogatory, certainly, but more of like a union like mine. This is my job. This is my function. And if it’s out of my function, then I have no obligation to it. So you’re asked this is this something is wrong. Can you help me? Yes. And you start asking them questions. Well, I don’t know. OK, well, who do I contact to figure that out? I don’t know. OK. OK. Well, who who manages that around you? Well, it’s it’s Tomas or Yasek or whoever. OK, well, can you go talk to them and figure it out? No. Why? Well, it’s it’s almost. three o’clock here and I leave at three o’clock. Okay. So, so, so, so that was quite a learning experience. And I feel certainly that happens here. Oh yeah. Got to clock out, you know, it’s break time, that sort of thing. But I, and not that they were resistant to solving the problem. It was just a mindset of, well, this isn’t my problem. It’s your problem. That was kind of a mindset that I had to work around, figure out how to interact with. And it’s, again, I don’t want it to sound derogatory, but very cultural. And the other aspect of that is holidays. They hold their holidays near and dear. Time off is very important to them. And so, again, those tick marks on the clock, I had to keep record of. If it was approaching 9 a.m. my time, that means it’s almost quitting time over there. So if I needed to interact with folks, I had to accommodate on my schedule simply because they…
Speaker 0 | 50:34.892
you know really aren’t exposed to the american mindset around work and time off and and accomplishments and such so yeah that reminds me of our earlier discussion when when you were mentioning that on during some of those days while you were back in the us you were getting up at two o’clock in the morning yeah
Speaker 1 | 50:55.541
especially around that three-letter curse word edi when we implemented I had to accommodate their work schedule. So I would wake up at 2 a.m. and I would work a full eight hours because we needed their institutional knowledge about the orders and how it should look and how the system should operate. But we had to accommodate on the technical side. And so it was a two-week stint of working from 2 a.m. until 5 p.m. some days because the Americans needed it. my support too so yeah and and if i remember you were newly married had a young child at that point we uh not newly married but we had two small children so i i was doing a lot of travel with my wife we had a three-year-old and a um basically a newborn not not quite one and when i all that was happening so i mean it was
Speaker 0 | 52:01.840
Bless her soul.
Speaker 1 | 52:02.940
I know. I mean,
Speaker 0 | 52:06.783
I know. I remember just some of those long nights that I had and it was nothing like what you were doing. And I would walk in and I’d just get that look and here. And they just go away. You’re dealing with it. I don’t care. And you’re like, but I, but I, but I. No, I don’t care.
Speaker 1 | 52:27.295
Yep. I tried my best to accommodate, you know, whenever I was home, I tried to do whatever I could to take that load off because it was it was it was a lot. I was going through a lot. You know, my wife is going through a lot with me not being there as often. And I’m glad those times are over, at least for now.
Speaker 0 | 52:49.714
Yeah, no, I understand that completely. Any any lessons around that that were some of those life lessons? that helped you obtain this director position? Or is it more communication?
Speaker 1 | 53:07.264
I think communication plays such a big part in what we do. We have to make IT accessible. We have to make IT understood. We have to lead. the business leaders understand the impact of making a decision or choosing not to make that decision. And I think most of that comes down to communication. If you can’t relate or communicate to the CEO, to the CFO, it’s really difficult to… have technology be that business partner. You can manage switches. You can manage a VPN. You can make sure email flows. But I think it’s really difficult to drive value, drive the value of IT in a business, making it a strategic arm of the business without communication.
Speaker 0 | 54:17.673
Yeah, it’s communication. Yeah, well, that’s just… key to everybody, but I think we have a slightly different challenge in the sense that, you know, not only do we have to know the technical language, we have to know the business language, and we have to be able to communicate to those that may not know either. Back to your example of trying to work with people who are communicating to you in their second language, not their first, and trying to get some of those technical terms across that barrier. That’s quite the bucket to carry up the hill.
Speaker 1 | 55:00.969
Yep. Yep. It really is.
Speaker 0 | 55:03.890
And those of us that learn how to do that anymore, though, I think that that’s becoming kind of table stakes. You’ve got to be able to do that. Otherwise, you’re you’re if you cannot at least communicate and talk to others and be able to communicate, hear their language and adapt to it.
Speaker 1 | 55:29.504
Yeah. Adapting.
Speaker 0 | 55:31.005
Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 55:32.185
So I mean. 20 years ago, if you were a kid out of high school, fresh out of college, and you knew Excel really well, or you knew Access 95 really well, and you could solve a solution, or you could implement a solution to a significant problem, like that got you, that got you somewhere. But again, that scale, you can’t, you know, can a network admin who has all the Cisco training in the world, can they… grow themselves without learning those soft skills. And I think, like you said, it’s table stakes. I think people can, I think they have to be comfortable with that. And if someone chooses not to do that, that’s great. There’s still a place for someone who needs deep technical knowledge. They don’t like working with people. They want to sit at a desk. There are places for But again,
Speaker 0 | 56:26.384
you need my headphones. I mean,
Speaker 1 | 56:28.164
yeah,
Speaker 0 | 56:28.525
we’re off.
Speaker 1 | 56:29.565
Yeah. But I think it takes a, I hate to say a specific person, but I think it takes a certain type of person with the right desires to kind of learn those soft skills to adapt, to grow, really to kind of move up that ladder. And then also, I mean, a lot of luck, right? I mean, I was in the right place at the right time. I was hired on because I knew SQL and I was able to grow my position into the director of IT at that location.
Speaker 0 | 57:01.874
right i mean so there’s luck in there as well um i want to bring up one more thing um that one of the challenges that you told me about that you ran into that one of the organizations you were working for got acquired and and after they got acquired they had the acquiring company had different thoughts on how i.t should be segmented and how i.t should work and Tell me a little bit more about that one.
Speaker 1 | 57:33.651
Yeah, so I worked for a company for seven years, traveled to Poland, really had a lot of management support. And so I kind of consider that my dream job, right? Now I’m finding myself trying to recapture that magic. And we were acquired. made great business sense for the companies. And it was just, it was a much larger company than ours. And so we were kind of, they had, the company had to figure out how are they going to work with this expanded IT group? And so they kind of broke it up into infrastructure and business application, which is the team that I led. So I led a team of wonderful ERP analysts. and EDI analysts and database developers. And it was a dance. You had to, we had to rely on infrastructure. Infrastructure had to rely on us. But because it was a larger company, some processes and some standards were already chosen. A lot of the standards that I had built and developed at the company that was acquired, they were, they were, gone away with or dissolved and we just kind of adopted these other practices. And there were limitations, certainly. Cost was a big factor. I had the luxury of choosing solid platforms regardless of the cost and the company that acquired us was much more cost conscious. So there was a lot of decisions by default in that regard. But yeah, you need to be able to trust your teams when your business applications can’t run because the VPNs keep failing or because someone from a different company changes a network route and doesn’t tell anybody. And I would imagine most of your audience has experience with that, especially working in these larger companies. What I learned through that. process was I’m much more comfortable in kind of the smaller midsize. space rather than kind of the large global space. So it was a learning opportunity. I’m really glad that I had that experience. Really loved a lot of the people I worked with, fantastic folks. There was just sometimes there is corporate infrastructure that is there for reasons, but it just was not for me.
Speaker 0 | 60:33.498
You know, there’s so many times that, I don’t know, hopefully we have some other C-level type people in here listening to us besides just the geeks and the nerds. But as soon as you told me that they segregated business apps and infrastructure, man, alarms started going off in my head because I just dealt with that too much. If you’re a multi-site low or a multi-site enterprise, Those two groups need to have hooks into each other. They need to be talking to each other because business apps run on that infrastructure. And so they require that infrastructure. And the infrastructure folks need to understand how those business apps are set up so that they can make sure that they don’t hamstring them. You know, we were talking in the pre-interview and you brought up another one of those three-letter cuss words. I’m sorry. DNS and mentioned how you had some of those infrastructure folks go in and instead of making sure that the networking was done correctly and the DNS and everything’s working, they go in and just change the hosts file on one computer or maybe on three computers out of 15. And so, you know, trying to troubleshoot that as you’re troubleshooting across an enterprise, multi-site enterprise. And yet three computers are configured completely differently.
Speaker 1 | 62:05.779
Yep. And some of that was just kind of mindset scalability. I had gone through those experiences where I would never have accepted that as a solution. In fact, I told my folks, don’t do it. I don’t want you to change a host file. We need to solve the problem. And unfortunately, we would just continually bang our heads. lack of urgency and so here we are manually changing a host file so that we can make sure these orders go out today so yeah business has to business has to continue we’re there to help them make money yep about them making money there’s no need for us to be there well and some of i i think some of that is the legacy mindset of it and and at that company it was also under the cfo And I believe that there is a case to be made where IT should have its own direct leadership through from the bottom floor to the top floor. I I develop the point of view. I want IT to to to be a partner. I have knowledge and experience that can drive the company in similar ways to sales. I can’t bring in money. but I can help us make better choices. And when you distill IT down to how much is this costing me, that’s when I think we get into those situations where IT is a drain, IT costs a lot. Hey, why are we paying this software maintenance stuff? Can we lower the IT budget by getting rid of this stuff?
Speaker 0 | 63:55.182
I mean, the computer’s 15 years old anyway. It’s not like, look, it’s been working for 15 years, and you’re going to tell me that we need to pay three times what it was worth 15 years ago so that we can do an upgrade tomorrow? It’s been working for 15 years. Why? Why do I want to pay that?
Speaker 1 | 64:12.592
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 64:13.572
Communication.
Speaker 1 | 64:14.733
Yep. Bingo.
Speaker 0 | 64:18.715
So as we hit an hour and… that kind of time. Is there anything that you want to promote? Is there anything that you want to bring up, talk about what’s going on that rocks your world?
Speaker 1 | 64:34.706
Oh, self-promotion. I’m really bad at self-promotion. No, I don’t think so. Not personally.
Speaker 0 | 64:47.034
How are things at the new organization? Because, you know, you’ve been there four months.
Speaker 1 | 64:52.178
So talk about that. It is, it is a hot mess. I was, challenges that we’re still facing. But man, I love it.
Speaker 0 | 65:10.466
I was going to say, you’re supposed to use the word opportunities.
Speaker 1 | 65:14.169
There are many, many opportunities.
Speaker 0 | 65:17.812
Right on. Hey, I think it’s a fundamental piece of a majority of those of us in IT where we love puzzles.
Speaker 1 | 65:29.443
Yep.
Speaker 0 | 65:29.803
We love solving problems. Yep. And… And that those opportunities and those challenges keep you keep me coming back in every day.
Speaker 1 | 65:40.088
Yep. And so kind of going back to the legacy of U of I.T., this company wants to be tech forward. They want to grow. They want to better themselves. They there’s a CIO that I report to who’s a fantastic leader and I really enjoy him. as a boss and as a person. And we have management support to do the things we need to do to accomplish the tasks that the business asks us to do. And so work is hard. I’ve been working from home now, 10, 12 hour days, sometimes doing a lot of travel to Denver area. But I mean, I love it. I love every minute of it.
Speaker 0 | 66:31.506
Cool. And the, um, so are you learning any lessons from him so that you can have that succession plan and follow him into that seat, um, someday in the future? What, what is he doing that you’re going? Oh, so let’s end with that. Tell me, tell me the spark that he’s giving you there.
Speaker 1 | 66:54.012
Yeah, he, he is, he’s really good at communicating. He is really good. Right. I mean, we’re going to bring it back to communication. Really good at communicating, really good at humanizing situations and people not focusing on processes, tasks and requirements. And I mean, just a kind, just a kind person. So that’s the yeah, just again, communication. Focusing on people, I think, is another big aspect of what I’m learning here. Yeah, we’re replaceable, but we’re all people, right? We’re not tasks. We’re not robots. And treating people like people goes a long way.
Speaker 0 | 67:46.676
Yeah, it does. It helps. It helps so much. And it makes it so that not only is it interesting to go into a job full of opportunities, but you get to enjoy your day beyond just being able to get that sense of accomplishment.
Speaker 1 | 68:04.808
Yep. Those 12-hour days seem like four-hour days here where sometimes you get that luxury.
Speaker 0 | 68:16.316
Well, awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Joe. It’s been a great interview, and keep listening.
