Speaker 0 | 00:06.652
All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today,
Speaker 1 | 00:10.755
David
Speaker 0 | 00:11.736
Radabaugh, well today, depending on when or where you’re or how you’re listening to this, but today, David Radabaugh, Director of Information Technology at ANC Plastics. We got to love plastics, have to love plastics in this world. Um, so I don’t know about all those people out there that hate plastics, but today we love plastics. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 | 00:32.561
Thank you. Appreciate it. Good to be here.
Speaker 0 | 00:34.622
So the, well, let’s start off with this. How many end users and, or people that you must manage or support, no support, take care of coddle, make sure everything’s working on a daily basis.
Speaker 2 | 00:48.413
Okay. Yeah. So we’ve got, uh, just about a hundred end users. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 00:52.016
Um, so talk to me, man. What’s, uh, what’s, what’s daily life. like over there?
Speaker 2 | 00:57.100
Yeah. So in my position, daily life is really a lot of figuring out how to make everybody’s life easier. I feel like that’s my role. We have a couple of people that work in the IT department with me that are more responsible for kind of day-to-day end user support. And my role is more finding ways to make IT support the rest of the business. So evaluating different… options that we have in whether it’s automation, AI, anything like that, kind of vetting a lot of different vendors that come to us with solutions and the viability of them from a business perspective. I think right now we’re going through a Salesforce integration with our ERP system. So a whole lot of communication between an integrator, the Salesforce side, our ERP side, making sure everything runs smoothly and everybody’s happy with the performance of the systems that they’re working on.
Speaker 0 | 01:53.648
That’s not an easy job. I mean, ERP API, I mean, any type of ERP migration. So if you’re good at it, then I just see that you’ve done ERP migrations before. And usually it’s not something that people really look forward to. But if you enjoy it.
Speaker 2 | 02:12.922
It’s not, there are tougher jobs, all right? It’s not the worst thing in the world.
Speaker 0 | 02:17.225
So 100 end users, three people team, that’s good. You guys, so it sounds like your company truly appreciates the value of IT. Yeah,
Speaker 2 | 02:26.570
absolutely.
Speaker 0 | 02:27.590
And I say that because the average ratio of IT staff to end user, which we’ve seen from crunching numbers and data over time, is about 1 to 100. And you’ve got 3 to 100. So that’s good. You said something that’s kind of a term that everyone throws around a lot. You said AI and automation. AI, it’s like, yeah, we’ve got to migrate stuff to the cloud. Um, AI, I find to be in even more grandiose, um, um, layer of, of confusion for people, multiple layers of confusion. How, how do you guys plan on using AI to make life, make more money to do more with less or to automate or to streamline?
Speaker 2 | 03:11.191
Yeah. So, um, I think kind of like everybody else, our first step in using AI was actually just having our salespeople use it to. help them communicate with customers and really make sure that the wording on whatever they’re trying to communicate is effective and kind of palatable to the people that they’re trying to talk to. Because I think, you know, everybody has an idea they want to communicate, but sometimes it needs a little revision to really reach the person, right?
Speaker 0 | 03:37.171
What are you guys using? Claude? I mean, what are we using for that?
Speaker 2 | 03:41.154
At the moment, they’re just plugging things into chat GPT and saying, hey, can you make this sound more professional or more a more approachable. You know, it depends on the sales rep. We’ve kind of told them, Hey, this is how you come off by default. So you should ask it to rephrase it in a way that’s either a little more direct or a little more, a little less direct for some of them. You know, it really varies.
Speaker 0 | 04:00.929
You should try Claude. I’ve used Claude. Claude is so good. So good. I find it just better from a, from a, from a text perspective and for everyone out there listening, if you want, if you want our secret AI weapon, it’s It’s Poe.com. Are you familiar with Poe? P-O-E?
Speaker 2 | 04:17.942
No, I haven’t heard of that.
Speaker 0 | 04:19.583
Yeah, just, you can tag me later. Everyone thank me later. Thank me, thank me later. Please, I want your comments on, I want thank yous. Poe.com, because it’s basically like this massive, massive group of all of the AI bots that are out there, and Claude is on there. Claude, chat GPT for whatever version these things are now and all that stuff. But, yeah. So someone said, hey, sales guys, was it you, by the way? Hey, sales guys, stop doing this. Please use chat GBT or who said that?
Speaker 2 | 04:54.694
It was actually the president of our company. She tries to stay. kind of really abreast new technological offerings. She’s not an IT person by nature, but she kind of tries to stay in the know on all the future tech coming out and everything. That’s kind of why we have a bigger IT department than you’d typically see. She tries to modernize the company a lot. And she just said, hey, I’ve been using this personally. I like the results I’ve gotten with it. So let’s go ahead and encourage all of our salespeople to use it.
Speaker 0 | 05:24.584
If this isn’t a reason to use Claude, I don’t know what is. Amazon invested 4 billion, 4 billion. Okay. It’s very good. I mean, very good. It will, again, thank me later. I would love to know. I want your CEO to say, wow, this is really cool too. I want to know what she says. Let me know later. I want to know if she thinks it’s better, but really, really, really, really good.
Speaker 2 | 05:53.201
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 05:53.541
We’ll have to check it out. Okay. So. Um, sales reps that don’t know how to talk to people. Whoa,
Speaker 2 | 06:00.627
that’s rough. Uh, you know, I wouldn’t say reach a wider audience with how they speak.
Speaker 0 | 06:06.849
Um, okay, good. So, uh, what else, what other AI things?
Speaker 2 | 06:10.450
Yeah. So, uh, a kind of cool tool that we’ve been exploring that’s offered by our VoIP provider is live AI feedback on outbound calls.
Speaker 0 | 06:20.332
Uh, let me take a guess. Let me take a guess on who the VoIP provider is. Um, dial pad no hold on hold on it’s either gonna be maybe maybe uh we’ll do rumple stills can only get three um wanted your ring central oh you got it on the last one ah there we go yep good old ring central pulling it off today okay so how’s the how’s the um outbound um sentiment i guess we call that sentiment you’re talking too fast philly i get i get you’re talking too fast a lot from the sentiment stuff
Speaker 2 | 06:54.446
Yeah. So we haven’t rolled it out to everyone yet. We’re still kind of exploring the tool and seeing if we want to purchase enough licenses or potentially just buy a couple licenses and use it for actually onboarding and training people. So people that aren’t necessarily used to working in a sales environment or making outbound calls, but it seems like a really, really cool tool. I mean, obviously it’s got its limitations. It’s not going to accurately predict how everyone wants to be talked to. And we tell them, Hey, if you have an established relationship and you know how to talk to them, Yep. You, you know, the customer better than the AI is going to know the data set. So, uh, you always have the ability to kind of say, I don’t care if you’re telling me they don’t like how I’m talking. I know this is how they like to be talked to. But as a general tool, it seems like it’s got a pretty good handle on, uh, improving people’s abilities.
Speaker 0 | 07:41.799
Uh, ring central is a sponsor of the show. So love central, not biased, not biased, a little bit, but actually I’m very biased, but I’m always biased towards, um, I’m biased towards vendors for the right reason. I would say I’m vendor neutral, but I’m biased because let’s just be honest. Some people have good support. Some don’t. Some have better products. Some don’t. So we got to be biased. People saying I’m non-biased. You have to be biased.
Speaker 1 | 08:08.418
At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never-ending, from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients, even on the best of days. So, whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, and you’re managing one location, Our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power. in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts. so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is… email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 0 | 10:28.097
Any other AI tips or tricks?
Speaker 2 | 10:31.940
Well, no tips. If anyone wants to give some advice on this, we’re actually trying to find a way to use it to improve our purchasing and supply chain performance. Um, we haven’t found a good avenue for that yet, but I’m sure there’s a lot of, a lot of stuff out there, but I think that’s an area where it could be extremely useful. Um, we just haven’t found a way to leverage it.
Speaker 0 | 10:51.195
Uh, where are the roadblocks or where are the potential things to speed up? I mean,
Speaker 2 | 10:56.380
so I think our biggest, our biggest issue is being in the plastics industry. Um, it’s actually kind of surprising to a lot of people. Our suppliers are not just, uh, exclusively Chinese by any means we have. kind of a global supply chain. And that includes North American suppliers. So our issue is we have maybe 30 different suppliers that all make the same product. And even though it’s the same product, you get customers that say, I want this brand. And we’re like, guys, it’s the same thing, regardless of who makes it, but they only want to buy it from a certain brand. Robert Leonardus So it becomes incredibly time consuming for our supply chain team to try to manage. We need to import three pallets of this product. but one from each supplier, even though it’s the same product and we can get a better price buying three pallets from an individual supplier. So it becomes extremely time consuming for them to try to balance that across multiple locations that we have as well.
Speaker 0 | 11:53.303
Well, Greg Liddell, the Frenchman behind the scenes of dissecting probably righty nerds is my AI engineer guy. Greg, marinate on that. Maybe we should bring you on the show and we can talk. We did talk a little bit of French too. It’ll be sound nice. And maybe we have a solution for that. Some kind of, I would, I would think there, there could be some kind of no code solution for that, but yeah, that is kind of wild. It’s literally the exact same product, the exact same thing. I mean,
Speaker 2 | 12:20.941
yeah, it’s all brand affiliation. You know, if they’ve said, Hey, even if we tell them it’s the same product, maybe in the back of their minds, they’re thinking it’s similar and they’re getting a better price. So they’re selling it to us. It’s the same thing or something.
Speaker 0 | 12:32.005
Maybe they have a relationship with them somehow that’s unseen. It’s unknown. Hmm. There’s an AI thing. How do we uncover secret relationships and build more behind the scenes, deep rooted relationships? The what is the I guess so many other AI things?
Speaker 2 | 12:51.427
I’m sure there will be in the future, but we’re we’re trying to take it kind of piecemeal and look at it department by department and try and implement it that way. Like, I’m sure the next step would probably be improving our warehouse layout using AI. because I’m sure there’s a lot of area for us to improve like the speed and efficiency that we’re picking and packing orders.
Speaker 0 | 13:12.057
Since I asked this a lot on the shows, if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?
Speaker 2 | 13:16.499
28.
Speaker 0 | 13:17.420
Oh, this is great. This is excellent. So you’re just, you’re like a spring chicken. Yeah. Spring chicken. How did you, so a lot of people that have been on the show that are either IT directors or TTOs, they may have gotten started out in IT, you know, like. We were playing around with computers when they were like kind of a new thing, like an invention, right? Like there was no internet. There was no, there was certainly, there was no cell phones. There was no iPhone. There was like an Apple IIc floppy, a computer with floppy disks that you put in. You had boot disks. You had to boot a computer up with a disk. There was no, we had computers with no hard drives. So when I speak of an age like that, what is that? But I’m curious as to what the thoughts are that go through your head.
Speaker 2 | 14:06.284
Yeah. I mean, I actually, I’ve always kind of had an interest in technology, but it didn’t actually manifest in a career sense for quite a while. I went to business school rather than anything for IT. But it was, I don’t know if you’re familiar with management information systems. It’s through business school, but it does heavily involve using computers. And from there, I kind of got involved in… process improvement and performance analysis, which it was funny. I was working at a place as a consultant and their CEO, it was a medium-sized business, probably 500 to 1,000 employees. And their CEO said, I don’t want to learn an ERP system. Give me everything I want in Excel. So my job was to create an ERP light in Excel. And that got me… pretty good at using Excel, I’d say. And from there, it was just like the place I’m working at now was looking for someone that they advertised as an Excel expert. Turns out they needed an IT person and I just kind of filled the role and learned what I needed to learn.
Speaker 0 | 15:14.375
Wow. So yeah, I got to know. I got to know how deep can one go in Excel? It must be insane.
Speaker 2 | 15:23.942
If you are comfortable using VBA, that’s the built-in programming language behind Excel, you can make it do a lot of things that you shouldn’t make it do. I mean, I’ve seen people who have like, they’re on a contract, right? Not a full-time hire. And they have a certain number of hours that they’re supposed to work on a project for. They finish it two hours early. And since their productivity is being tracked, they don’t want to launch like Internet Explorer or anything, right? And browse the web. But they’ll build a media player into Excel so that the computer tracks their work as Excel and it’s playing media files from YouTube or something. I mean, you can make it do ridiculous things if you’re comfortable with VBA.
Speaker 0 | 16:03.606
What was this ERP system in Excel? Like, I don’t like how? Like what? Well. What did it have? I want to know some of these components. Yes.
Speaker 2 | 16:13.033
So it had a very, I would say, lightweight sort of purchase order requirements generation tool. So it would look at past component usage and build sort of a rudimentary, here’s what we’ll need to order in the next coming months based on past demand and past trends. It had a sort of milestone analysis so that we could track where are we getting held up whenever we’re trying to process things. And then it had some basic throughput analysis for a high-level view so that they could see, hey, we do have enough orders in the pipeline. We’re getting held up at the actual… It was a 3D printing company. So we’re getting held up at the printers or we’re getting held up… The way we were doing 3D printing, you kind of had to excavate the prints out of the printers because it was sand-based printing. So it was like, oh, we’re getting held… We don’t have enough people working on the excavation after the print job is done, that kind of stuff. But it was… I mean, there were a lot of different modules, but… But… I would say opposed to an actual ERP system, you could definitely see the shortcomings, but it was in a more digestible format for someone who was stuck in their ways and didn’t want to learn another tool.
Speaker 0 | 17:19.218
So when he went into work, what did he click on? I’m just curious.
Speaker 2 | 17:22.961
He clicked on a workbook that was called, I think I named it like, it was like the company name underscore ERP or something. I mean, the company had an actual ERP system that the rest of the users all use.
Speaker 0 | 17:36.971
Oh,
Speaker 2 | 17:37.331
only the high level executives that worked in the sort of ERP light and Excel.
Speaker 0 | 17:41.994
More, more than one executive worked in this Excel workbook. Yes. Was it a shared workbook? Did it, there was an API from the, how did you get data from that workbook to like, I mean, how did you input data? Like, how did it work?
Speaker 2 | 17:57.305
So it had live links. Um, there was. Our ERP system had a live database and a replicated database that was probably like two seconds behind or something. And so it was built with connections to the replicated database. So it was loading in data from that replicated database live, refreshing every, I want to say, minute or so. And because they weren’t using it to actually place any purchase orders or process an order or anything like that, they were looking at it to get a high level view of the performance of the business. They didn’t need to have a shared workbook. because they weren’t using it to actually affect any change that gets sent out across the business.
Speaker 0 | 18:32.606
It was like basically analysis. Yes. It was a high level. I need reporting. Give me reporting. Wow. That’s just really cool. That’s really nerdy. I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 | 18:47.136
Not my most fun thing, but it was functional.
Speaker 0 | 18:54.061
Hold that thought because I do want to know what the most fun thing was. fun thing is, but that’s, um, is that, was that type of thing, like from a general it leadership perspective, is that type of thing secure?
Speaker 2 | 19:09.706
Uh, it is secure as long as it is not able to push data back or be accessed by anyone outside of our network. I mean, it is, it’s as secure as any other tools going to be in that. If the leadership copies it and takes it to their home computer and opens it on that and their home computers compromised, then no, it’s not going to be secure. But I think in general, the point of failure on that is still going to be the end user and not the programmer application itself.
Speaker 0 | 19:37.943
Which he certainly did.
Speaker 2 | 19:40.184
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, to be fair, I, you know, I, they always say CYA, right? I told him, do not take this home. You know, don’t put this on any of your personal machines. Absolutely. got done that way because I know the kind of guy he was,
Speaker 0 | 19:54.020
but yeah. Ah, what’s the job? Be careful.
Speaker 2 | 19:57.383
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 19:59.884
Yeah. Cause, uh, that’s, that’s humans. That’s exact. That’s just every human. I think that’s every human. I’m telling you, don’t do this. I know you’re going to, but I have to be, what is, so what is your most fun thing? This is a great question. Actually, I got to ask more people this. What is your most fun thing in it?
Speaker 2 | 20:20.710
Okay. So this comes from the perspective of someone who really loves data analytics, but my most fun thing is actually a project that we’re currently working on. It’s been kind of ongoing for the past couple of years because it’s live right now, but we’re constantly working to make improvements to it. I love competition. And what we do to kind of instigate competition and foster it is we have live statistics that go up on our sales floor for all of our sales reps. And honestly, everyone at the company to look at, and it says, who sold the most today? Who’s answered the most calls? All those kinds of statistics get pulled up. And at the end of the day, for example, with five minutes left to go in the day, it’ll sort of close out and you’ll hear the Rocky theme song come on and you’ll see whatever sales rep sold the most. Their picture will just come up on the center screen. We try to make it a little more engaging than just seeing charts, right? Because I think charts are nice, but you really want to get people involved and get them to actually pay attention to it. So we like to try to make it as fun as possible. for them.
Speaker 0 | 21:20.554
Do we give out any awards?
Speaker 2 | 21:22.094
We have prizes there. I mean, they’re based on monthly performance rather than the daily one. The daily one’s all about pride, but we do have awards based on like month. There’s a, there are some, you know, incentives, but there’s also like a championship, like wrestling style belt that they get to hang on their desk. If they win for the month, that kind of stuff, you know, things to make it more fun.
Speaker 0 | 21:39.799
I think I should start up another podcast where we just talk about crazy stuff that like sales departments do.
Speaker 2 | 21:46.881
I think you’d have a lot, a lot of content.
Speaker 0 | 21:50.410
I would probably get killed to be honest with you. Cause it’s like, it’s worse than some of these things are worse than like the wolf of wall street doesn’t even do it justice. It’s, um, we had, uh, I remember an organization where we had, we had one of those torsos. Do you know the rubber punching bag torso? Yeah. It’s like a half human, right. You know, with like a black plastic thing on the bottom. So. There was a sales contest and the torso was dressed up as Rambo. So they basically put like, you know, like they put like a headband on it. They put a wig on it and made the thing look like Rambo. And then whoever won similar situation, right? Like whoever won whatever contest was for the day. This was the daily thing. Then was allowed to stand at the front of the room with the Chuck Norris joke book. read, read, read a joke out of the Chuck Norris joke book and then do something to the like, you know, torso. So it went from like people putting cigarettes out on this thing to stabbing it to, I think eventually the guy that actually won it for the month had like a Harley and ended up putting like a chain around its neck and like driving it down the street, dragging it from his motorcycle.
Speaker 2 | 23:13.015
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 23:14.876
It was, uh, yeah, it was, I was just, you know, just. There’s some ridiculously wild thing. Oh yeah, what else do you say to that? You’re like, Phil, we’re not that crazy. We just have the rock, just the rocky theme.
Speaker 2 | 23:25.663
I mean, we’ve tried to tone it down, right? I mean, I’m sure I’ve heard stories pre-growth about what went on in our sales department. But now that we have an HR team, it’s like, all right, well, gotta be a little more careful.
Speaker 0 | 23:39.373
Oh, we had HR. We had people shooting starter guns off. We had a guy shoot a starter gun off in the building. Inside the building, it said blank. So it’s got blanks, you know, like in the air when someone would set an appointment or something, you know, shoot a starter gun off. So anyways, just you brought me brought me back to maybe a darker time. I don’t know. Just for the record, everybody, I’m married with eight kids. I’m highly, highly conservative with. with a lot of values just so you know but that doesn’t mean that i didn’t work in a crazy place i did i worked in a very crazy place it was called cb on in case anyone remembers that the okay so 28 years old how did you get started out in well we got we got kind of how you got started out in technology like you know you’re in business and did that but like what i want to know what a 28 years old’s first like version of a computer is that’s like you’re like my son-in-law’s age Yeah. So his, what was his first computer? I don’t know, but he had like, I mean, it was probably like a PlayStation.
Speaker 2 | 24:44.658
Definitely a gateway.
Speaker 0 | 24:47.560
Uh,
Speaker 2 | 24:48.421
I mean, we had a family, my dad was sort of, he was a Jack of all trades, but I think when I was young, he worked as like an it manager. Um, so we definitely had some beat up old gateway computer that was sitting in the family room, probably overheating and some credenza or something, um, to run like, you know, Sim City.
Speaker 0 | 25:12.024
Yeah, that was it. That was it. I had Pong, if that dates me at all. Literally Pong screwed into the back of the television. Okay, so. Um, data analytics, the, everyone’s saying the data is like the new, like going to be the new currency and all that type of stuff. I don’t know any thoughts around that.
Speaker 2 | 25:35.543
Um, I mean, I think there’s a lot of value in data, but I think the data is only as good as the people either presenting it or interpreting it. I could, I could take the data we have right now in our system and make a million different points that. mislead people in a million different directions. So I think as valuable as data is, you have to know what you’re doing with it in order to actually present any value from it.
Speaker 0 | 25:58.997
Okay. So let’s just use the show then as an example, selfishly. I’ve got so much data from IT directors. We’ve got AI bots. My mad scientist, Greg, the Frenchman, Lidal, he’s building these bots that crawl the episodes and… and dissect like certain pain points and different issues and um key points that you know it directors bring up and now we’ve got this whole kind of like mid-market um pain point analyzer we’ve got these different bots that ai is using to pull out data what kind of data would you want to know if you had access to 300 of your peers that had all done podcasts on it leadership and What would you do with that data?
Speaker 2 | 26:52.557
So my big, I guess the kind of, the way I was brought up in data analytics was to focus on trends. So my big, big interest point would be, you know, is there a trend in viewership and what’s it based around? Is it based around subject, guest, you know, the background of the guest, you know, does it perform better when we see guests with more experience, less experience? higher level CTO or do CTOs draw less interest? I don’t know. I really like to see what drive, which obviously requires a larger data set than a lot of other things, but I really like to see how different metrics tend to trend. And once you have the trend, you have to see, just because you have the trend, it doesn’t mean that you know the cause of it. So you also have to have a background that’s able to interpret the data that you’re looking at and sort of get the causation behind it.
Speaker 0 | 27:49.036
That’s very profound. So which selfishly makes me want to ask you then, okay, well, where should I be grabbing other data then? And where should we, if you were running this show, Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, or as a listener also, what do you want to hear more of?
Speaker 2 | 28:06.004
This may be specifically just because of my background, but I see, you know, I don’t actually bother listening to them, which should tell you something, but I see a million. ads for podcasts that are based around technical skills. And I think there’s a lot more interesting content and a lot more value that can be derived from podcasts that teach people how to make IT work from a business perspective. So to me, it’s a lot more interesting and I think a lot more approachable for a much bigger audience to hear about IT as it relates to business and how it can be valuable to a business rather than here’s the top five coding languages you need to learn. to make more money for yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 28:46.365
Boring, boring.
Speaker 2 | 28:47.806
Right.
Speaker 0 | 28:48.566
Besides who wants, who wants to talk with coders and go hide in a room somewhere? No, I’m just kidding. Look kind of serious. The yeah. So that’s why that’s the point of the show to bridge the gap between it in the business world. And how do we take technology and use it as a business force multiplier to make more money? Kind of like the Amazon effect. Like, can’t I just like. go work in a garage for a little while, like Amazon and then become the richest man in the world. That’s what we want to do, right? Yeah. What are some of the most important, what are some of the most important questions than an IT rector coming in to a role? Because we’ve got a lot of people that are stuck in the server room still. People, I think it was Aaron Siemens back in the day said we used to just be guys that hid in the server room and you slid pizzas under the door to us, to the guys that are now creating real business change and business growth, what should the IT leaders, IT directors be doing? Questions they should be asking? Because there’s going to be a difference between the business-driven IT director and the IT director that’s kind of just new to leadership and trying to figure it out.
Speaker 2 | 30:02.172
Yeah. I think really the most important question that I try to ask myself constantly, because I am still… relatively new to this is, I have to really focus on this sometimes. Is this something that’s going to add value to the business or is this just something that interests me? I think sometimes we fixate on things that, you know, there are a lot of tools out there that I think are really, really cool. But when I look at it, I say, hey, we’re a plastics company with 100 employees. Does this really fit our business use? Is this going to serve us? And I think that’s something that, you know, everybody probably deals with it. I know I definitely do. So, yeah, it’s really just taking a step back and making sure that whatever you’re doing is going to be useful to the company that you’re working with.
Speaker 0 | 30:51.390
that’s the quote of the show is this something very useful for the business or is this just something that i’m interested in because we we can get very we can go down a um a rabbit hole very easily on on any number of pieces of technology and things that things could do yes
Speaker 2 | 31:08.457
or no yeah yeah absolutely okay um do you exercise uh yeah i try to um you know it’s it’s I’m still young enough that I don’t have a good excuse not to. So for nothing else, experiences, yeah.
Speaker 0 | 31:26.947
I’m dealing with a really bad nerd neck. Do you sit in a chair all day? Do you have a standing desk? Do you walk around a lot? What’s the deal?
Speaker 2 | 31:33.529
So I try to walk around a lot. I have a dog that frequently makes noises when I’m on calls, which is just great. So I have to make sure she’s entertained. And I have a sit-stand desk, but I’m working on mounting my computer to the bottom of the desk because… You come into an issue with a desktop PC and a sit-stand desk where you can’t actually stand or else you wind up with a bunch of cables getting unplugged and stuff. So haven’t gotten a bunch of use out of it yet.
Speaker 0 | 32:03.163
I’m just dealing with such a bad case of nerd neck. And I’m just warning everyone now that you can’t really do anything with… with posture, like people will tell you, you can try and sit and like, you know, skip a good posture and everything, but no, if you’ve been psychologically been doing something for so long, you can’t, you actually need to do exercises. You need to do whatever cable pulls, face pulls, get to the gym and do all that stuff. So I don’t know that I’m just, I’m just warning everyone now, if you’ve ever been in a significant level of pain that you’ve never felt before from a, from like a pinched nerve in a neck or, you know, a weird C6, C7 thing. all do because you’re sitting in a chair all day or like I have for the last 20 years or something, then you want to avoid that as much as possible. What is the end game for you? What’s the future? What do you see the future next 20 years? What’s the end game for IT people?
Speaker 2 | 33:01.661
Yeah. I mean, I think that can branch a lot of different ways based on someone’s personal interests. But for me, I think it’s continuing to try and bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the business because I think there’s a big… Even though people have been talking about doing that for a long time, I think there’s still a lot of companies that struggle with that. And I think for me, I’d really like to continue to develop my technical skills. Coming from a business background has a lot of advantages, but it also means that a lot of things can go over my head and I have to do my own research on them to try and stay… uh, as up to date as I should. So I’d really like to continue to develop my technical skills, but at the same time, not lose sight of the, uh, the value that can be provided by being someone that’s able to bridge the gap between the business and the it side. And I think just growing in that arena.
Speaker 0 | 33:55.103
Well, let’s flip the script on that a little bit. What type of, at a bare minimum, what type of business knowledge should you have if you don’t have any business knowledge and you’ve been in it your whole life?
Speaker 2 | 34:06.332
Okay. Um, I think that The best way to start is definitely to take on some of the easier concepts that can still be valuable. So to me, throughput is a great example. You could break throughput down so simply that a kindergartner could understand it. You could say, hey, here’s how much money each stage of the business is sitting on right now. And I think- Example.
Speaker 0 | 34:27.768
We need examples. Let’s do this.
Speaker 2 | 34:29.309
So a really basic interpretation of it would be, here’s how much we have outstanding in quotes that we’re waiting to hear back on. Here’s the dollar amount that we have in orders that are waiting to be processed. Here’s the amount we have actually processed and sitting in the warehouse waiting to be shipped out. And here’s the amount we shipped out today. So if you look at that and you say, we’ve got a million in quotes, we’ve got a million in orders, we’ve got 500,000 in the shipping area, and then we shipped a million out, right? Then you can look at it and say, hey, we probably have a bottleneck that’s preventing us from moving the amount that we need to from that actual order stage. to the shipping stage. So if you look at it and you say, there’s one area of the business that’s sitting behind the rest of the others, then you can identify that and say, hey, there’s probably something that we can look at, whether it’s from an IT side or not, there’s something we can look at here. and try and identify what the bottleneck is and why we’re struggling to make the productivity of this area match the rest of what we’ve got.
Speaker 0 | 35:29.784
I just throw more bandwidth at it. Yeah. Okay. So throughput. Okay. Next bullet point. What else do we need to know?
Speaker 2 | 35:38.450
Okay. This isn’t necessarily a business skill, but this is something I see IT people struggle with that really, I think, prevents them from making the jump. to a leadership role.
Speaker 0 | 35:49.576
I’ll be, I’ll be the judge of this. Go.
Speaker 2 | 35:52.017
You have to know how to talk to people.
Speaker 0 | 35:53.778
Oh, that is absolutely a business skill. Number one, sales absolutely have to sales fix all problems. Mark Cuban, more sales fix problems. If you can’t talk to people, you just got done. We’re using the ring central bot to help talk to people.
Speaker 2 | 36:06.605
Uh, well, I think for a lot of it people, I don’t know if it’s ego or what it is, but they, they want to prove their knowledge. So when they talk to people, even outside of the it arena, they speak in very technical terms.
Speaker 0 | 36:19.312
We got to gnat this over to Costco on Friday. And
Speaker 2 | 36:27.315
I think you have to trust that you’re going to be able to provide value without having to sound like that. Because if you try to present to your CEO and you speak in terms they’re not going to understand, if they’re direct, they’re going to tell you that you’re not saying anything that they care about. And if they’re indirect, they’re going to leave it not thinking that you’re really that helpful or vital to the business.
Speaker 0 | 36:47.912
My book is called Speaking the Language of Business IT. There’s a chapter called Yes, You Have to Speak to People. So I would say that’s important. Okay, next thing.
Speaker 2 | 37:00.242
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 37:01.503
Throughput, speaking to people. Bullet point three. We’re going to have at least three.
Speaker 2 | 37:05.947
Bullet point three. Okay.
Speaker 0 | 37:08.149
If not five, we might have to go five.
Speaker 2 | 37:10.151
So this is another thing that I think it’s relevant in all arenas. And it’s something that I see. I can kind of immediately tell people that I’m working with how I’m going to like them based on their response to this. But it’s you have to be willing to learn.
Speaker 0 | 37:26.398
OK, likeability.
Speaker 2 | 37:28.419
You can’t come in thinking you know everything, even if you already do, because IT evolves constantly. So if you know everything today, tomorrow, if you don’t want to learn anything, you might be behind everyone else. So you have to continue to learn and grow and be willing to kind of be humble and understand that. You’re never going to be, you know, have a hundred percent grasp on everything.
Speaker 0 | 37:49.907
I can tell right away. I’m not going to like you because you are not coachable. The yeah, no, I, uh, I had a past boss that he said the number one, one of the number one factors he looks for in someone is coachability. If they’re coachable, anyone can grow. He’s like, I can teach anyone how to do like, I’m sure you could teach almost anyone how to use active directory or something if you had to, as long as they were coachable. Look, I know how to click on computers. Okay. I know how to do stuff. Okay. Leave me alone. Okay. So coachability, business factors. You started out business school, right? Yeah. Actual business, nerdy terms, accounting terms or something. We got two more points we need to know. What does an IT director need to know?
Speaker 2 | 38:39.697
This is something I really hate, but… it has to be one of the more present issues that I come into. You have to know accounting terminology, at least basic accounting terminology. Because if you’re in a business leadership position, even if it’s IT, you’re probably going to be responsible for a budget. You’re probably going to be responsible for presenting an analysis of new projects that you’re going to work on and whatnot. And you’re going to have to be able to say, hey, here’s how much it’s going to cost. Here’s how much we’re going to make off of it. Here’s the 10-year. projection from it, all the different accounting terminology, not the super in-depth stuff, but you have to be able to speak money to people.
Speaker 0 | 39:20.339
We should have a section of the show called Making Accounting Fun. Accounting terms, EBITDA, CapEx, OpEx, gross margin, controllable costs, non-controllable costs, labor, I don’t know, flex percentage or something, flow through profit, profit margin. net sales. I think that would do it. I think if you know those, you’re pretty good. If you know those, you’re good. EBITDA.
Speaker 2 | 39:49.509
That’d be a pretty good cover. Good luck getting people to watch it.
Speaker 0 | 39:52.630
EBITDA. Okay. We’re going to go back to the data analytics. That one is not trending, Phil.
Speaker 2 | 40:02.853
No, probably not.
Speaker 0 | 40:06.014
All the accountants are like, what do you mean? EBITDA. Got to know EBITDA. got to know it. If you, well, you don’t have to know it, but if you do know it, you’re probably going to have a little bit of a step up from somebody else to how many, uh, do you think a lot of it directors could, would be able to speak to EBITDA?
Speaker 2 | 40:23.936
No. In my experience, no, I don’t think so. Now, to be fair, I generally work with companies that are around the same size as us. So in the least negative terminology possible, it’s not always the absolute top candidates, right? They might wind up at larger companies, but most of the IT leadership that I work with would not, no.
Speaker 0 | 40:50.066
Okay. So we got a fifth bullet point. So we’ve got, okay, first of all, we got… I got to try to remember these, see how test fills memory. Throughput, talk to people, coachability, the most exciting thing of all, accounting terms. What is number five? We must have number five in the business world. Number five, what is it?
Speaker 2 | 41:12.558
This, again, is relative to the position you’re in. But if you’re in a manufacturing world, then you have to understand the flow of the warehouse. I think the warehouse is one of the areas that IT is most underutilized and underappreciated. I’ve worked on projects to modernize warehouses. We had people who were manually picking orders and then typing in item IDs, bins, wherever they’re pulling it from, all that kind of stuff. And we actually managed to turn the warehouse from that into not scanners, but actually having gates that do the scanning for them. So basically, all they do is pick something up with a forklift. drive it over to the shipping area. And without them entering anything manually, the system knows, hey, they’ve just picked a full pallet of this. They’ve moved it from that bin into the shipping area. And they never actually have to go in on a scanner or a computer or anything and enter any of that.
Speaker 0 | 42:07.240
Get involved in operations. I love that you said that. It’s so true because some of the best stories that I’ve heard from IT managers, IT directors, CTOs, leadership, whatever, people that got into the C-suite or whatever it is. is because they affected production on a manufacturing floor. They came in and because there’s such a separation sometimes, sometimes like, no, what are you talking about? I run the network. I make sure that I’ve got email. No, but I’ve had stories of people in the past that have set up cameras watching the manufacturing floor and then sat there or just sat there and watched, you know, and we’re like, why is that guy doing that? Like, why is he walking from there to there? Like, why’d they stop production, clean everything, clean the place up. Why’d they do that? Oh, because we had an emergency order that came in and yeah, but it shut down production for like three hours because you had to make like one little thing. Like, could we have just, could they have just ordered more efficiently and you want to have that emergency order? And, you know, um, I’ve, I’ve seen like a single loan, Lone Star IT guy come in and eliminate like 173% of like. labor. So they got rid of a hundred percent of the temporary labor and then decreased other labor costs. You know, that’s like massive.
Speaker 2 | 43:25.277
Right.
Speaker 1 | 43:27.078
At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime. due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data. to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So we’re still human, but we are some of the best and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popular it.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 0 | 45:47.200
The top five, uh, throughput, which I already forgot. I see throughput. What does throughput mean? What did we say?
Speaker 2 | 45:55.385
At the end of the day, it’s identifying. Oh yes,
Speaker 0 | 45:57.247
yes, yes, yes. Bottlenecks. Thank you. It kind of goes with the last one, but okay. Yes. So, uh, yeah. So from a very simple, so that was the, Oh yeah, that was the third grader one that I couldn’t remember. That was the, as the third grader one, uh, uh, the, the sections of the company and where the bottlenecks. Yes. Uh, talk to people. Hmm. If you can’t do that, can that be learned? I absolutely think it can be learned scripted.
Speaker 2 | 46:22.329
I had to learn it. I, I was one of the worst examples of being able to talk to people for a long time.
Speaker 0 | 46:28.198
I think you can script it. Like there’s some certain things that you can do. Like for example, David, I’m just curious, man. What’s your favorite food?
Speaker 2 | 46:35.663
Fried chicken.
Speaker 0 | 46:37.164
Oh man. Raising canes. You ever been there?
Speaker 2 | 46:41.287
Oh yeah. There’s one like five minutes from me.
Speaker 0 | 46:43.348
Oh gosh. Gosh. Yeah. I ordered the tray. Tray. See how we just connected. Let’s go hit it. You know what? Forget this. Let’s just, let’s go hit raising canes up right now.
Speaker 2 | 46:56.437
All right.
Speaker 0 | 46:59.330
twist my leg no i’ll walk there uh okay um they just opened one up from me it’s 20 minutes away and uh yeah i guess it’s like a 40 minute wait every day oh my goodness yeah there’s not many raising canes where i’m from in fact i think it was the first one in connecticut and uh i’m not really a huge fan of connecticut i just ended up here um but yeah oh you So there you go. You can script these different things to make talking with people easier. Yeah. For example, what’s your favorite food? Pretty easy. Come up with some scripted questions. And then to segue into IT and how you can talk to people. Hey, when it comes to, I don’t know, what’s one of the things you guys do? Run a plastic mold machine or something? There’s got to be.
Speaker 2 | 47:50.809
We have fabrication saws.
Speaker 0 | 47:53.634
Okay. So, Hey, when it comes to the, I don’t know, everything’s going around on the floor down there, the saws and everything, when it comes to this and it and what you guys do there, what’s your single biggest, uh, problem, frustration or concern with us? Yeah. You guys don’t know how to talk to people. Oh, uh, thanks. Uh, but no, for real, you can ask certain questions that are open. I think open-ended questions is one of the biggest ways to connect with people, open-ended questions. So yes, it can be learned. Um, It has been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for taking the time to, I guess, to give back to your fellow IT colleagues and people that are running the grind every day and keeping, honestly, the wheels of industry turning. Because if everyone in IT just quit, now they have all these days now. Like today is national whatever day. Like I guess there was… There’s Pi Day the other day. There’s always, they all overlap now. But what if it was like today’s the international IT go on strike day?
Speaker 2 | 49:01.452
You know, I don’t think that’s a bad idea.
Speaker 0 | 49:03.393
I am not a proponent of politics or uprisings or protesting in the street. I am not suggesting this, but what if some knucklehead came up with the idea of today is the national… I.T. strike day where we will shut. We will log out of everything and go to Raising Cane’s.
Speaker 2 | 49:31.105
You know, there’s a raise.
Speaker 0 | 49:32.726
Kids will be like,
Speaker 1 | 49:33.166
oh, yeah,
Speaker 2 | 49:34.307
they’ll sign. Or now they’ll do cash only.
Speaker 1 | 49:38.208
Our point of sale is down.
Speaker 0 | 49:40.369
It’s like it backfired. But except for Raising Cane’s, you guys. Yeah,
Speaker 2 | 49:46.732
they can stay working.
Speaker 0 | 49:47.892
I can help you with that. Anyways. Um, yeah, what would happen?
Speaker 2 | 49:53.323
I mean, I think there’s, there’s a joke that has been going around for a long time. That’s like, uh, in it, if everything’s going well, they ask why they pay you. And if everything’s going wrong, they ask why they pay you. Right. So, uh, sometimes it can, it can be easy to feel like you’re not, not appreciated. Uh, so maybe that would help.
Speaker 0 | 50:10.799
Yes. I have told people for years, if you’re really good at it, if you’re really, really good at it, you need to go break something sometimes. Yeah. You need to break something so that you can go refix it and be like, hey, look, see, it works.
Speaker 2 | 50:23.974
Right. Or you put arbitrary stops in your code that run every 10 seconds. And then when someone asks for some optimization, you just remove those and say, hey, we’ve improved performance.
Speaker 0 | 50:34.070
Yeah, that’s messed up. That probably,
Speaker 2 | 50:38.713
I would never do that.
Speaker 0 | 50:40.814
That’s messed up. Look at our, hey, by the way, I would like to have an MBO management by business objectives this year. If I increase productivity by 10%, I would like a bonus. Look, just hit F1, F2, 3, 5, shift control space bar. Boom, done. Uh, uh, thank you, sir. Any, any words of, uh, final advice to anyone out there listening?
Speaker 2 | 51:10.804
Um, I just, I think it’s important for everyone to know that, uh, you don’t have to know everything as long as you’re willing to learn whatever you need to.
Speaker 0 | 51:19.392
Yes. Thank you, sir. Thank you for being on dissecting popular it nerds.
Speaker 2 | 51:22.955
Absolutely. I appreciate it. Thank you, Phil. Take care.
