Speaker 0 | 00:09.726

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. My daughter the other day heard me doing this intro and she said, Dad, you sound like such a robot. You just don’t sound like yourself, Dad. You sound like a robot when you’re doing your podcast. So I’m trying not to sound like a robot too much. But today we have… Greg Altman on the show. And IT, you know, what’s really amazing is as I look over and scroll down through your LinkedIn profile, it says 27 years and one month. And that, I mean, that is dedication, but it’s not dedication so much that amazes me is that how much technology has changed in that amount of time. Did we even have the internet at the company that long ago?

Speaker 1 | 01:02.256

No, no, we did not.

Speaker 0 | 01:03.937

I mean, that just goes to show you the internet is really not, it’s not an old thing. And we act like, we act like this is something that has been around forever. And I try to explain to my kids like how fun it was to go to, you know, Holden House of Pizza. get a pizza and then go wait in line for an hour to hope to get into the opening of Rambo, you know? Yeah. And you just wouldn’t do that anymore. And all the stores that have closed. But anyways, man, welcome to the show. And let’s just, let’s go back to, I guess, 1996. I had just graduated high school. And you are still working at the same company that you are working at today. So let’s just tell me kind of what it was like back then.

Speaker 1 | 02:04.398

Well, I had just moved into IT from our purchasing department. Our programming manager basically saw that I was writing macros to do boring, repetitive things on our IBM system.

Speaker 0 | 02:19.769

And what about. First of all, we have to really describe this because there’s people that listen to this show that are like, I don’t understand. I’ve literally heard before, why is the save icon this weird little square thing? Why is the save icon this weird thing? So just paint a picture of what that machine could do in these macros. What was going on?

Speaker 1 | 02:45.165

Well, in those days, most of our… Most of the people who worked at a desk were a floor covering company. So a lot of our people work in the warehouse. They don’t have computers at all. Really? They have little handheld things. Now, back then, nothing. Most of our people had dumb terminals that connected to our mainframe system. They didn’t connect to anything other than that system. And it ran a green screen program. Yeah. I was still working in purchasing when they decided that maybe we should try this PC thing out. And they put one shared PC per department. and I realized that the Telnet program that ran on that PC, it connected to our mainframe. You could do macros. So you could basically go through and record your steps and then put a little code in there that would let it repeat and loop. And so I had some very boring repetitive tasks that I had to do every month. So I automated those basically. I mean, that’s a term we use now is automate those. I mean, nobody was really thinking.

Speaker 0 | 03:49.346

What was the task that you had to do? Just curious.

Speaker 1 | 03:51.887

It was updating flooring displays at our customers. Every quarter, one of our suppliers would do an update to their product line. And we had to send out all these updates to all these customers. It was like 150 orders that had 10 line items each. And the only thing that changed between all 150 of those orders was the customer. So basically-How much time did this save you? Oh, it was a week and a half project to go through and manually type in each one. And by the time I spent about three weeks figuring out how to write the macro, and once I figured it out, it took, the next go around took about three hours.

Speaker 0 | 04:36.472

Amazing. See, there’s return on investment right there. Anyone that says that IAT is a cost center.

Speaker 1 | 04:43.128

All right. And I was sold right there.

Speaker 0 | 04:46.329

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so did you then, just out of curiosity on this back in 1996, where I believe I still had a 386 with a CD-ROM, which is big time.

Speaker 1 | 04:59.976

Yeah. did you um did you like then take this project to anyone and say hey look at what i did or did you just take that time off and sit at the beach no i uh i showed my manager who said well that’s that’s a i guess that’s something for all that time he’s been playing on that thing uh he was very old school i was skeptical skeptical i showed our it manager and he was like that’s cool What else do you think you can do with that? And I was off to the races. Six months later, I was in the IT department. Nice. I started off working as an RPG programmer on our IBM iMainframe. It’s actually technically mid-range. And I did that for Wait, wait,

Speaker 0 | 05:50.130

RPG as in role-playing game?

Speaker 1 | 05:52.271

No, as in work processing generator, I think is what it stands for.

Speaker 0 | 05:57.575

We weren’t playing Dungeons & Dragons at the same time.

Speaker 1 | 06:00.945

No, it wasn’t nearly that much fun.

Speaker 0 | 06:03.405

I almost said unfortunately. Okay, so keep going.

Speaker 1 | 06:10.407

But anyway, actually that was 95, I guess. 96 was when we started putting more and more PCs out and we installed our first Windows server in late 96, I guess. It was… Windows, I think it was NT4 back then. It was a small business server. It had one of those, one box that had Exchange and SharePoint and IIS and all that got built into it.

Speaker 0 | 06:40.737

Back in 96?

Speaker 1 | 06:42.178

Yes, yes. Wow,

Speaker 0 | 06:43.439

okay. So, I mean, so you guys were using email or, you know, you were using email back then like that early or what?

Speaker 1 | 06:51.825

96, that was why we installed that server was so that we could start doing email.

Speaker 0 | 06:56.168

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 06:57.029

To give you an idea about the email volume that we had, we would dial into our ISP, download all the email because they would store it all for us. We would download it all and then we would shut that. Then we would end the connection and then it would distribute the email out to the maybe 10 people in the whole company who had email.

Speaker 0 | 07:18.283

So it was still crazy kind of manual. I mean, it’s like mail delivery. It was like electronic mail that then had to be physically delivered. Like, hey, can you print out all those emails, please? And can you deliver them with the mail to everyone’s desk?

Speaker 1 | 07:34.723

It was not much removed from that.

Speaker 0 | 07:39.544

Dial-up? You said ISP. So, I mean, was it dial-up? Okay, so no T1 or anything like that? Crazy.

Speaker 1 | 07:45.766

Not at that point. The T1 came later, but 98, we started doing fractional T’s. And then we moved to frame, and then probably… Late 98, we moved to frame relay.

Speaker 0 | 08:00.011

People still love that, believe it or not. People are still, every now and then I’ll run into someone that’s still on a frame relay.

Speaker 1 | 08:05.213

Oh my God.

Speaker 0 | 08:06.994

Yeah, you know, and the other day I had an emergency. I had like this like emergency one where we replaced a TDM, like T1 for an old hotel. Because a lot of hotels have really old PBXs in them still. like 1970s PBXs because all the hotel rooms are analog and it’s a nightmare to recable a hotel. It’s crazy expensive. And so I’m running into hotels that are scrambling last minute to replace PBXs or try to upgrade PBXs to a PRI with a PRI card that can’t be upgraded because they’re still on a T1 CAS or a 28 channel, like old school analog fractionalized T1. and pretty much like Verizon and in the wind streams and that, you know, like basically the Verizons and the, where the Ilex of the world are drawing, you know, drawing a line in the sand and saying, you know, we’re not supporting these anymore. So, uh, you know, March 1st, um, your T1 CAS will no longer work. Like we’re just shutting it down, you know? And they’ve been on these like old PBX is like, Oh man, like, what do we do? And I had, uh, something come in and it said, you know, like, it said like, it The problem was the billing system in these telecom companies can’t even say T1, CAS, or it can’t even describe. It can’t even describe what they have. So we all thought, oh, it’s a PRI because the bill said PRI. We’ll just order another PRI, no problem. Wrong. Yeah, exactly. And it was just like a machine with one of those cone locks. You know, like the… why kind of the barrel locks like the machine was like a cage with like a barrel lock you know to like get into the pbx you know to like unplug and we’re like no this ain’t gonna work anyways anything like that since uh our

Speaker 1 | 10:04.474

old we had an old mitel like a mitel sx200 that we finally retired in like Oh, I don’t know, 05, 06? When we started doing voice over IP in 06. Early

Speaker 0 | 10:24.626

06. And that’s early, too. I mean, honestly, back then, people were very skeptical, and you still had QoS problems and issues, and the internet wasn’t really built for, you know, you had to have MPLS or something, or it wasn’t built for prioritization yet. Like nowadays, it’s a lot different. You can kind of… I mean, you can run, like, kind of bring your own bandwidth type scenarios with a lot of different providers that peer right. But, you know, let’s get back to this fascinating story, honestly, of growing up in IT because it’s different nowadays, right? Now people say, I want to get into IT, and people say, oh, you’ve got to get an MBA, you’ve got to get this, you’ve got to get these certifications, you’ve got to get this, this, and this. And that’s just not how you grew up in this world. So it’s… Um, I’m, I’m wondering if there’s really any, I mean, how did you end? How are you still here? 27 years later, did you have to get certifications? Did you grow? What’s your, what’s your thoughts on maybe continuing education and kind of how you, how you’ve gone along?

Speaker 1 | 11:26.579

Well, you have to be a lifelong learner. Um, and the, I mean, I didn’t get, uh, I haven’t gotten a lot of certifications. I toy with them. Uh, I find that a lot of times by the time that I. set aside work long enough to study for a certification, they’re already announcing that it’s about to be retired. So, okay, well, I’ve learned all the stuff. I haven’t taken the test. I’m getting better at doing that and scheduling my time for actually taking the test and passing it. I’m working on some Azure certifications right now. But the main thing is to be a dedicated problem solver and a lifelong learner. I would say probably my best skill is the fact that I read very quickly and I absorb at a pretty fair rate. So I can skim over stuff. And I learned, you know, the best IT skill that I’ve got. It’s funny. I just thought of this. I learned from my grandmother when I was in grade school. My grandmother was not very educated. And those days, you know, that was what she came up back in the 30s. when you left high school to go to work, right?

Speaker 0 | 12:44.718

Yep. My mom didn’t go to college. And I mean, I learned everything from my mom, even though my dad’s a doctor, like an MD surgeon.

Speaker 1 | 12:53.303

So when you have a seven, eight-year-old, very curious young man, such as myself, asking all these questions, why is the sky blue? Why does this do like this? Why does this do like that? She bought me a set of World Book encyclopedias.

Speaker 0 | 13:09.692

I remember that.

Speaker 1 | 13:11.829

And my uncle taught old school paper encyclopedias. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 13:15.270

yeah. Sit there and read from the start to finish. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 | 13:17.952

yeah. And my uncle taught me how to use the index and how to look up stuff. So when I would ask dumb questions or questions that she didn’t know the answer to or didn’t want to bother with, she would tell me to go look it up. And inadvertently, what she taught me was how to research and how to filter through things. Because, you know, when you do a Google search, you wind up with a gazillion answers. Half of them are wrong, right?

Speaker 0 | 13:41.665

Half for advertising too, half for marketing. Exactly. Actually, probably 90% are marketing.

Speaker 1 | 13:46.908

90% are marketing. But that ability to be able to filter out search results and research results and find answers quickly and keeping up with new technology just at a conversational level. I mean, I’m not an expert at a lot of the new technologies that come out. But when they become relevant to what we do here or something that someone wants me to do, then I can come up to speed really quickly because I’ve got that conversational basis. I mean, I know what it is, you know.

Speaker 0 | 14:25.913

Now, you mentioned a couple of things that are like near and dear to me. One, research. What’s your thoughts on partnering and getting other people to help do work for you?

Speaker 1 | 14:40.341

Well, it’s kind of, kind of team.

Speaker 0 | 14:43.283

I’m basically, I’m asking you is like, what, what’s your thoughts on the team? And I guess, do you have people on a team? Do you have other people that you work with? Do you have people that you manage? And, um, even if it’s not inside, what about, you know, outside collaboration? I mean,

Speaker 1 | 14:59.914

just like partners and such. Yeah. Um, well, I do have a guy who works for me. Um, he basically runs the help desk and is um coming along in his IT journey and he’s learning more and more about networking and servers and things of that nature. And security is kind of a place where he’s got a lot of interest and he’s learning the ropes, basically. He’s been in IT for probably three or four years. And again, did not come from a tech college or anything like that. He was… working in our shipping department, but he had that problem-solving mentality and that ability to learn quickly. So, it’s on-the-job training. As far as partners and stuff like that, it depends, really. If it’s something like, for example, we’re implementing RingCentral, and there’s parts of that implementation that are one and done. You set it up, you do it the first time, and then you don’t have to do it again. And then there’s other things that are, you know, ads, moves, changes, the administrative part that we want to know, we want to have a good sense of because I don’t want to have to call somebody every time there’s a little hiccup. I want to be able to do at least tier one troubleshooting ourselves. So that’s kind of the level of knowledge that we like to know.

Speaker 0 | 16:28.839

Why don’t you want to call somebody?

Speaker 1 | 16:32.922

Well, because it’s faster. A lot of times it’s faster.

Speaker 0 | 16:35.243

Okay, thank you. Thank you, fast, i.e. time. Your general opinion, and I have stats on this, this is what I do, but in your general opinion, what’s it like calling a provider?

Speaker 1 | 16:55.433

You’re talking about like a network provider?

Speaker 0 | 16:57.754

An ISP, a telecom provider. An ISP or a telecom provider. What’s your general feeling about that?

Speaker 1 | 17:07.238

Like hitting yourself in the knee with a hammer?

Speaker 0 | 17:11.901

Okay. You know, I really could have shot myself in the foot there. You could have said like, well, we got a great guy. You know, it’s awesome. You know, I refer to it as calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND or kick rocks.

Speaker 1 | 17:25.430

You’re absolutely right about that. Customer service in the communications business in general is the customer service piece is just not there. Hmm. And I don’t know.

Speaker 0 | 17:37.938

Why do you think that is, just out of curiosity?

Speaker 1 | 17:40.359

I don’t know. Maybe because there hasn’t been anyone who wanted to step up and say, hey, we’re going to be that provider for you.

Speaker 0 | 17:53.847

You’re talking to him right now. I just want to let you know that.

Speaker 1 | 17:56.969

But you’re not a provider, are you? You’re a third party, right?

Speaker 0 | 18:00.611

Well, so my, and this isn’t where this was supposed to go. this is supposed to be about you but since you asked um no i come from my group we run it like a law firm i come from a group of xc levels from the telecom industry so we’re a bunch of c-level executives from telecom that didn’t want to sell one any one product we wanted to be carrier agnostic and we saw the biggest gap being uh support so we’re you know we’re a master agency but we run it more like a law firm where we have managing partners like me and about 12 of us that specifically focus our, we take 20% of all our earnings and we put it into a back office for sales engineering, ticket escalation. And then because we sell really so much, I mean, we bill over 30 million a month. Because of that, all the carriers give us extra enterprise level support. So whereas one person might typically call like, the 1-800-GO-POUND-SAND number. With us, we’re giving you really that extra layer of support that you haven’t ever gotten. And then while the direct sales reps average lifespan is about eight months, that means your contractual lifespan is longer than any perceived personal attention you would ever get from a sales rep. whose job is primarily to sell you and get you into the billing process. And then once you’re in the billing process, you’re calling a butt in the seat inside of a call center. So that’s kind of the view of, I guess, the landscape of the marketplace. So we’re providing that really kind of hands-on extra layer of support layered with our partnerships with all the providers. So you still contract direct with the providers, and you use us and you basically become… I guess you’d call it more like a co-op. I like looking at it as like a co-op, right? You’re all together with our billing and you get all this extra level of support and everything while still contracting directly with them. But believe me, when I call a provider, it’s different than when, you know, just general customer who’s in the billing process calls the provider, if that makes sense. Um, so kind of like a third party, but not really. It’s more like a co-op, I guess, or more of a partnership. I like to say partnership. I mean, it’s a good word. Now, with that being said, you, uh, when I’m reading on your, um, again, reading on your about section, I have also been the principal admin of a short tail VoIP phone system for over 10 years. So, um, for all of those people out there, there that are still diehard Avaya people, diehard Shortel, diehard Mitel, or anyone that really wants to,

Speaker 1 | 20:52.352

I guess,

Speaker 0 | 20:56.133

water drops on the eyelids or toothpicks and lemon juice on paper cuts and all that stuff, want to get a Cisco call manager and put that into a data center and manage that themselves. For those people out there, what is the difference? I mean, what is the learning curve level? Because- You’re putting this as a bullet point on what is many people consider a resume, which is LinkedIn. I was the principal admin of a short tail VoIP system. Like that’s an actual thing. Like that needed a skill. Do you believe that you really need skill nowadays to manage that amazing RingCentral GUI that you just, which again, I want to shoot myself because I love RingCentral. I really do. But you contracted with them directly before we even knew each other. So this is not a biased call. I’m just. putting that out there, asterisks, not a biased call. You chose RingCentral all by yourself. So I want to ask you, comparatively speaking, managing the Shortel box in the back room compared to the GUI that you have right now, is there a difference?

Speaker 1 | 21:58.198

Yes and no. I mean, the Shortel GUI is very, very good. The biggest difference is not the user interface. It’s not the administrative day-to-day. The biggest difference is the hardware. And with RingCentral, there’s not hardware. Or if there is, it’s just the desk phones. Whereas, I mean, the reason why we moved away from the Shortel system, I mean, our Shortel equipment’s 13 years old. It’s end of life, and we were going to have to do a forklift on it. So… rather than buy new equipment and then still be tied to locations. Because, I mean, we’re based in Texas. Our headquarters is in Houston. One good hurricane and our building may be wiped out. And we don’t, and having to worry about, oh, well, we’ve got to have redundant systems and we have to fail over and we have to move, you know, ring, you know, call paths. 800 numbers ringing here versus there. Having to do all of that.

Speaker 0 | 23:07.200

Weird IP schemes and VPNs and stuff.

Speaker 1 | 23:10.923

We’ve been doing it for 20 years, but that’s not the world we live in anymore. And younger, newer users, employees, they want to be able to work from their laptop at Starbucks if they want to. My goal for 2020, actually, it’s our project that we’re working on is Workforce Mobility 2020. Nice. And all of our customer-facing employees will have laptops and, you know, RingCentral and headsets and all of this working off of a soft phone. So that not just in case of, you know, a disaster like a hurricane, but, you know, hey, my car won’t start this morning. Fine, work from home. Or my kid’s sick. They work from home. And just that flexibility to where whether the employee works from home or has to come into the office or goes to a different office to work, that becomes a management decision. It’s not technology bound. So technology enables management to make whatever decision they want to make.

Speaker 0 | 24:19.978

Flexibility there, yeah.

Speaker 1 | 24:21.400

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 24:25.043

But in general, to summarize the basics, disaster avoidance. CapEx versus OpEx, not depreciating a box in the back room anymore. I’ve been saying for years that PBX is dead. It’s a sinking ship. It’s sunk. And people used to hate me when I said that. Avaya is a sinking ship. The sinking ship is done. Remember those massive, huge Avaya headquarters? I can remember driving by them and the hotels and the Hilton sponsored by Avaya and stuff like that. It’s just… not there anymore. And surprise, surprise, they just partnered with RingCentral for their cloud offering.

Speaker 1 | 25:06.429

AT&T as well.

Speaker 0 | 25:08.010

Yeah, AT&T, what’s interesting about AT&T is they were wholesaling RingCentral for a while, then went to go do their own thing. And then came back to Ring of Centuries.

Speaker 1 | 25:17.450

Then came back.

Speaker 0 | 25:18.772

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So outstanding. So we grew up in IT. What was the network like? And again, I just, I love reminiscing. What was your network like? Did you have hubs, switches, you know, macros? Do you remember the first day where people, was there like a line that you drew kind of in the sand where people started using?

Speaker 1 | 25:45.374

um where there was kind of like a big difference or something when you guys upgraded some kind of crm or something like that just i don’t know just i want to hear more of the the past it was um well first of all we before hubs before switches all of our uh pcs ran on token ring ibm token ring which predates ethernet um our dumb terminals were on twin x cables uh and then when uh when it became apparent that TCP IP was the big standard that everything was going to be TCP IP. We ripped all that out and replaced everything with ethernet. And yes, in the beginning we had hubs and then we moved very quickly to switches. I mean, we probably only had hubs in place for not even six months. And then it was like, Ooh, yeah, we, we really should have done the switch thing first. So we moved into, we moved into switches and. Then as PC prices dropped and the prices for terminals grew and the need grew, we started moving more and more people to PCs. Now the only dumb terminals we have left, actually, we don’t have any. We retired the last one that we had bought in 1999. We retired it like three months ago. It had been sitting in a back corner of a warehouse.

Speaker 0 | 27:11.182

uh just as a place for warehouse guys to look up stock or tell me you kept it years um actually i did do you know how often i just wish i every now and then i find myself searching through the attic of my house in the basement like i wonder if he kept the computer is it there is it there somewhere you know i every now and then i’m like maybe he put it here like i’m looking for this old texas instruments you know like the bill cosby texas instruments one i can’t remember what the model number was off the top of my head or i’m hoping like a ti-99 yeah exactly I’m hoping that my old Apple IIc is sitting around somewhere under a bench or something, but it’s not. I don’t know where it went. Someone got rid of it. I’m going to ask you this. This is something that I find to be a little bit of an anomaly. I’m assuming the answer is going to be no, but did you have any mentors that made a difference in your technology career growing up?

Speaker 1 | 28:11.058

By growing up, you mean when I was growing up in the business,

Speaker 0 | 28:13.378

growing up in technology,

Speaker 1 | 28:14.199

the business. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 28:15.099

Did you have any, did you have any mentors that like really stick out and you’re like, man, this guy made a massive difference in my leadership or my whatever, whatever it was. Um,

Speaker 1 | 28:24.302

a couple actually, um, you know, the mentors, mentors have a tendency to be there for a season or for a time, a phase of your career. Um, our old it manager, Tim Groff, He, he’s the one who gave me the break. He’s the one who said, yeah, this, this kid who doesn’t have a college degree or anything, but he’s got the right brain. I can teach him how to be a programmer. And then when, when technology evolved to the point, I mean, our IT department was me and him. And when technology got to the point where somebody needed to manage all these PCs and network and stuff. It was either him or I, and he was a much better programmer than me, and I understood IP a lot better than he did. So it just kind of naturally fell that direction. But, yeah, he backed me up and encouraged me to learn and to stick with it even when things weren’t great. I mean, because, you know, everybody has their ups and downs.

Speaker 0 | 29:24.325

I mean, do you mind me asking what you mean by that?

Speaker 1 | 29:27.668

Oh, well, you know, you go through those periods where It’s, you know, working for a small company and you’re, and you start thinking about, well, maybe I should move on. Maybe I should go somewhere else.

Speaker 0 | 29:37.971

Is it a dead end? That type of thing? Why am I here? What am I doing with my life? That type of thing?

Speaker 1 | 29:43.315

You know, maybe I should, maybe I could go do something that seems more interesting and more exciting than managing servers and networks and stuff like that. But, you know, he always, he always had my back with, with senior management. You know, there’s. Everybody makes mistakes. And I mean, I remember one time where I made a bad mistake with a backup that cost us like six months worth of emails. And I mean… Back then, it wasn’t a career-ending move, but it was definitely a black mark on my record. I mean, we hadn’t had email but maybe a year and a half, you know? Yeah, yeah. It was like 30% of our emails were gone. But, you know, that’s making mistakes and having the ability to make mistakes and recover from them. I mean, that’s how we learn things.

Speaker 0 | 30:34.472

For the first time in my life, I thought about backup last night. I mean, normally I’m just like, yeah, if I lose everything, screw it. But for the first time in my life, I’m like, you know, if my hosting provider just decides to dump all my podcasts, I’ve got like two years of recordings and whatever else I typed in, all the blog posts and everything. I’m like, I’ve never backed any of that up. I just kind of started off doing this as a hobby, but what if it just kind of all just… disappeared. What would that mean?

Speaker 1 | 31:13.738

Storage is so cheap these days. I mean, it’s just, it’s ridiculous how cheap storage is.

Speaker 0 | 31:18.982

It is, but it’s the setting it up, you know what I mean? So that might be like a deep thought for Jack Handy. It’s so cheap, but why don’t you do it? Well, you know, I don’t know.

Speaker 1 | 31:30.490

And you know, people set up backups and then they never test to restore and then they’re surprised when it doesn’t work when they try. Well, you know, a backup’s not a backup unless you’ve tested the restore.

Speaker 0 | 31:39.720

Clearly, I am very transparent about myself here. How about this? Selling to upper management and or I could also put it this way, end user engagement slash selling to upper management. You mentioned something. I have to reframe this again. Your programmer was much better at programmering than you, but you were good at networking. So he let you network and he encouraged you. He gave you a break. He always had your back. This doesn’t sound like a programmer to me. And the only reason why I say that, and I’m not trying to stereotype people here, but I am. I’m stereotyping the classic engineer that’s kind of has this like emotionless, everyone else is dumb and I’m smarter than everyone else type of mentality. And the reason why I said that is because I had… a, I had a repair guy come in and repair our, like the little magnetic strip around our refrigerator this morning. And my wife, you know, as she checked his job at the end, which she always does, she checked his job, just, you know, like, let’s see how the new magnet makes the door, you know, stick to the refrigerator type of thing. You know what I mean? She’s like, you know, I can feel the magnetism on the left side is stronger than the right side. Now, What do you think a typical, I’m smarter than the world, you know, software engineering type of mindset would say to that? Just take a guess. What do you think?

Speaker 1 | 33:12.572

I don’t even know.

Speaker 0 | 33:14.953

This is how he said it, in the most sarcastic way possible.

Speaker 1 | 33:18.556

Wow,

Speaker 0 | 33:19.517

well, you’re the first person in the history of the world that can feel magnetism. I was like,

Speaker 1 | 33:25.841

oh my God.

Speaker 0 | 33:28.863

And I think… he was sarcastically trying to be funny or he’s just having a bad day. I don’t know what it was, but you could see the look. I’m sitting here, I’m sitting at the table just watching this whole thing unfold like, wow, I wonder what’s going to happen next. And I’m looking at my wife and I just see this look of really pissed look and then a sad look of, am I dumb? And that quite often is an interaction. this kind of human emotional intelligence of connecting with our end users that we miss and trying to translate from technology nerd speak of things that seem like common sense to us into, you know, the firewall isn’t the reason why the hand dryer in the bathroom’s blink is not working. You know, like what’s your kind of, I guess, thoughts on that or tricks of the trade?

Speaker 1 | 34:27.828

Well, one thing, going back to my mentor, Tim, let me just be clear. Part of the reason why he put me in charge of the network and the PCs and all of that and encouraged me was so that people would come to me with their problems and leave him alone so he could program.

Speaker 0 | 34:47.662

Exactly. So he was that guy. Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 34:50.304

he was. Absolutely. And the fact that I could talk to him. But yet I could also, I hate to say dumbed down, but I could translate to non-tech speak for the end users. That was a big part of my job in the early years, was translating for Tim. I was like the Oracle. But as far as selling things to upper management, I have kind of a formula that I do where I find the biggest thing is that the biggest mistake that we technical people usually make is we come in with Look at this cool technology. Look at what it does. It’s going to be better than what we have. It’s going to be great. What we don’t say is here’s the business problem that this solves. This is where it’s going to make us money or save us money. You know, to my CEO who comes from a sales background, the fact that it’s the latest, greatest thing means diddly. He doesn’t care. But when I come to him and say, hey, look, we moved to RingCentral. It’s going to save us this amount of money per year because we don’t have to pay for phone lines anymore. And the savings, we’re going to use part of that to fund buying laptops for all of our customer service people. And that gives them the flexibility to be able to work anytime, anyplace, irregardless of disasters or power outages or whatever.

Speaker 0 | 36:32.996

Let me ask you this. Let’s be realistic here. I see these numbers every day, all day, every single day. I do this literally thousands. That’s what you’re saying. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the PBX, the short tail, it was paid for. It was paid for. What do you have running in it? A PRI? PRI going into it? What do you have?

Speaker 1 | 36:55.289

We have a couple of PRIs and we do still have some old analog circuits.

Speaker 0 | 37:01.020

uh you know local POTS lines running into it okay so those are a ripoff um you know uh you got two PRIs that are like what I mean like maybe 600 bucks total a month or were you paying for local and long distance I mean they can’t be that much right um it well we’ve got so

Speaker 1 | 37:18.192

we got a T1 that runs into we got a one that runs into one each that runs into three of our locations okay okay

Speaker 0 | 37:29.736

So you got maybe three times 300. Okay.

Speaker 1 | 37:38.321

And then you, then you count in the short, then you count in the grand total of like 15 or 20 pots lines.

Speaker 0 | 37:46.227

Oh yeah. Okay. So for you, in your case, it was a savings.

Speaker 1 | 37:50.029

Absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 37:51.050

But for many people, for example, I had an it director that brought in ring central globally. China, India, UK, Thailand, Canada, all across the United States. And he was running his whole thing, his whole phone system, because it’s all engineers in the entire organization and they don’t talk to people. But there were about 600 people running on literally a single PRI in the United States on his open source Asterix box with old school Polycom phones. And it was just a nightmare for him and his staff. Um, but you know, the ring central and bill in that case was not a savings at all, but he still sold its upper management. So, I mean, I think that, that, Hey, we’re going to save money and we’re going to move into the 21st century and be more competitive in the marketplace. I think that’s an easy sale. What about when it costs more money? Like what’s the last sale you’ve had to make where it did like the business, there was a business problem and kind of net net upfront. CapEx, OpEx was more money, but the soft costs and the savings and the time savings, the saving on labor and the kind of the return on investment was much higher.

Speaker 1 | 39:08.216

That was last year when we moved from, we retired a bunch of our physical servers. Now, we had already virtualized most of the workloads, but we still had quite a few physical servers, you know, that we would move VMs between them. And I mean, they were getting old and they were getting harder to… They were no longer supported by Dell, and they were getting harder to get parts for. So I sold them on doing a pair of small but much higher-end, now they’re called Azure Stack HCI clusters. It was basically storage spaces direct. We did a pair of those, and I was able to retire like eight physical servers. And those things still have room for us to grow on. And yeah, I mean, it costs us.

Speaker 0 | 40:04.148

So there was room for growth. We were retiring eight old servers. But what was the argument that they bought into? Was it like, Hey, this is out of date. Like, okay, I got you. Got you.

Speaker 1 | 40:14.709

Got you. Reliability and, uh, and flexibility. I mean, they weren’t interested in the power savings or, uh, anything like that. But I mean, it was one of those deals. Like here’s, here’s the, the business processes that run on these devices that if you don’t let me upgrade them, I cannot guarantee how. you know, reliable that these devices are going to be. If something fails, I’ve got to scramble around and try and find a part on eBay or something. So do you want to run your business off eBay parts?

Speaker 0 | 40:51.887

I like that. That might be the title of the show. Business problem solved, or do you want to run your business off eBay parts? I’m taking notes here as fast as I can, because this is really good. uh, anything else in that department?

Speaker 1 | 41:14.973

I mean, that’s, I always do. Uh, I’ve kind of become infamous with our executive team because I always come to them with a, here’s a good, better, best solution to this. Um, and best being, like I said, you know, I whiteboard things and I always start off blue skying, you know, money was no object. And I had a magic wand that, that, you know,

Speaker 0 | 41:39.424

that that wrote let me ask you this are you a salesperson no absolutely you are well absolutely you are the funny thing you gotta get up we have to get out of this we have to get out of this mindset that salespeople are bad people it’s uh criminals are bad people people that lie are bad people people that um deceive are bad people but salespeople are good people because you just did that Yeah. I mean, you just sold it. In other words, it’s about it selling to upper management, good, better, best. You gave him an alternative of choice clothes. You know, you can buy this or you can buy this. Yeah. No, no, it’s not an option. Do nothing was not an option for you.

Speaker 1 | 42:20.562

Well, I do. I usually do another slide that this is the cost of doing nothing.

Speaker 0 | 42:27.926

Oh, I like that.

Speaker 1 | 42:29.987

And Sometimes it’s in the form of if it’s complicated, I’ll do a SWOT analysis, a strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat analysis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that kind of leads into the conversation of, well, what if we don’t do anything? Well, you see all these threats, all these weaknesses that become threats, they become reality. It becomes Tuesday.

Speaker 0 | 42:58.707

I like it. I like it. And then you move into a Colin Powell speech. You know, making no decision is still making a decision.

Speaker 1 | 43:08.811

Well, you know, you say a Colin Powell speech. I really think of that more like a Neil Peart speech. You know, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

Speaker 0 | 43:18.559

Oh, it’s been great. It’s been great.

Speaker 1 | 43:19.920

It’s a Rush reference for all you youngsters. Oh,

Speaker 0 | 43:23.102

man. Well, it’s been an… absolute pleasure if you had you know one piece of advice that you would send to you know it leaders directors people kind of growing up in technology is there anything that that comes to mind never stop learning how do we learn read the world book encyclopedias the um My dad is, my parents are very old and he’s getting ready to, he has two houses. He’s getting ready to sell one in the old house in New England. And I was like, I don’t think selling the house is going to be the problem because he’s got a barn and it’s kind of like a horse lover’s type of property and that type of thing. But I’m sitting in the living room with him while we’re having this conversation. And it’s just, it’s like a library living room, right? There’s no walls. It’s all bookshelves, wall-to-wall bookshelves with all these old books on them. And old national, like really, really old national geographics. Like you look at these things, there’s like no, like the cover, like if you pull it out, like the cover is just going to disintegrate. And like just some really old books in there and some really old, old, old sets of encyclopedias. And he’s like, I wonder if these things are worth anything. And, you know. I’m like, Dad, this is going to be the hardest thing, moving all this stuff. He’s like, no, we’re not. We’re just going to call the 1-800-GOT-JUNK, and we’re just going to start pointing. I don’t know if you’ve seen that ad, but it’s like a junk removal ad. And they’re like, just point, and we’ll get rid of it. I’m like, is this stuff for all we know? He’s like, is this worth anything? I was like, I don’t know. We’ll throw it on Craig’s list and see. Maybe it’s worth some kind of ton of money. So for anyone out there listening, if you know anything about old. encyclopedia sets and really, really old books, if they’re worth anything, you know, from New England in a house that was, I think, you know. 1813 or something like that. I don’t know. You know, give me a call, you know, my numbers on LinkedIn. So Greg, man, been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Speaker 1 | 45:35.427

Thank you.